Halfway Year Retrospective (Jan 1 - Jun 28)

7/5/26

Weeks 1-26: (Jan 1 - June 28): 115/130 Days at the Gym (4.4 Average), 202,207/260,000 Words Written (7,777 Average), 28/52 Drawings (1.1 Average), 54 Days Calorie Tracked (2.1 Average)

This is the first year where I’ve ever attempted tracking what I do every week, and the first thing that it’s forced me to confront is that it’s much harder to follow set goals than you’d think. I’ve recently thought of myself as a pretty disciplined person after losing so much weight, but it’s clear that I still have work to do in order to fulfill my goals.

That’s not to say that the experience has been all negative, and I’ve realized that I am not some disciplined person… I’ve just realized that I, like everyone else, am fully susceptible to distractions. I was distracted a lot for the first half of this year, whether it was through doomscrolling, watching useless videos, or just being lazy and doing nothing. It’s impossible to fully eliminate distractions, but I don’t want to allow them to consume me so much in the second half of this year.

The goal for setting these goals was to hold myself accountable, and to eventually have a point to look back and examine trends in the data to see where I could improve, and that’s what I’m going to be doing here.

In this blog, I’m going to assess my performance in all four of my goals, and either set a new goal or re-adjust the first one that I set. At the end of each, I’ll give myself a grade, and then give myself a total grade for the entire year.

GYM: 115 Days in the Gym, 130 Days Original Goal, 4.4 Days Averaged

The gym has actually been one of my strong points for the year, and I’ve slowly found a happy medium with my schedule. At the beginning of the year I wanted to go 5 days a week, but I have found that 4 days is more than enough to both continue losing weight and growing muscle. In the last few weeks, I haven’t criticized my gym-goings when I only went 4 times, meaning that the first goal switch we’re going to do is changing the Gym from 5 days a week to 4.

Overall though, my fitness is night and day from the beginning of the year to now. I’m happy with my progress at the gym, and I’m happy with my performance in this goal.

Grade: A

WRITING: 202,207 Words Written, 260,000 Words Original Goal, 7,777 Words Averaged

Writing this year has been interesting so far, as I came into this year with the goal of finishing my book. Is that going to actually happen? Honestly… not completely sure yet, because the chapters keep getting longer and longer. I wasn’t too far off from my writing goal despite school, and overall have been happy with how I’ve been progressing as a writer.

For me, this is my most important goal as writing is my favorite hobby and something I take pretty seriously. I’m not sure if it’s going to end up being my career, but I would say that is my dream job. Instead of focusing on pure output, I want to prioritize on continuing to improve my skills and finish my book the best I can, no matter the timetable or word count. For that, I am going to be slightly shifting my goal- I’m going to be switching to a time-based system, and try to write for 8 hours. Because that is hard to track, I’m still going to list my word count per week- to make sure that I’m at least still moving, I’m going to still aim for 10,000 words but at the very least try and hit 5,000.

Grade: B-

DRAWING: 28 Drawings Done, 52 Original Goal, 1.1 Drawings Averaged

Drawing is in a similar boat as writing, but I’ve really struggled to get digital art done. Part of that is because during the school semester I was doing a physical art class and I spent most of my time working on my skills through there.

This gets a B- as I have genuinely seen improvement in my skills. Through my art class I got a much better grasp on facial structure and anatomy, and have been trying to apply them. My best works this year have been Springtrap and Motherface. There’s not really any updated goal here- I want to try and draw more, and hopefully get to at least 50 finished digital pieces- more if possible.

Grade: B-

CALORIES: 54 Calories Tracked, 2.1 Days Averaged

Despite seeing major weight loss this year (down about 20 lbs) this has by far been my weakest thing. I’ve had several days where I just… don’t bother, either because I’m lazy or demotivated to continue. I am getting to the point where I am light enough to where I need to decide a point to cut off my weight loss, but either way I still want to count calories in order to know how much protein I’m getting and stuff.

I never set a goal for this besides the fact I wanted to be more mindful about it, so I will now. I aim to hit at least 4 days a week for the rest of the year.

Grade: C

I definitely cannot say this year has been a failure, as I have definitely seen improvement in all of these areas. I’ve gained muscle and lost weight, made decent progress on my book and have seen significant skill jumps in both writing and drawing. Despite that, I still feel there’s more that I can do to keep pushing myself- and as I stated before, I still faced distractions throughout the first half of this year.

For all of that, I’m going to give myself a B+. I’m going to do a full year retrospective as the first blog of the new year, and I’ll assess how I was for the second half of the year- here’s hoping I keep pushing forward.

Overall Grade: B+