The YOLO Report 2018

Welcome to my Fourth YOLO report. 2018 is over and I am now 31.56911 years old.

For the people reading this for the first time, I’ve always been a quantified-self freak and as an end-of-year ritual, I like to gather everything I tracked during the year, reflect on this, and try to use it to build the next year’s objectives.

If you’re interested about doing the same, jump to the end of this article to learn more about my process.

Why this kind of Year in Review report?

For some people I’m just a freak, for others a source of inspiration.

For me, taking a step back and looking at what I’ve done in a year is a great self-therapy and a good way to see how you can improve.

I could keep this to myself but putting it in front of the entire world is (1) a way for me to feel some peer pressure therefore to try to achieve my goals (2) maybe inspire others to do the same thing and through cycles of continuous improvement.

Please remember that there are as many ways of doing this as there are Human Beings. You could just write what you read, where you’ve been, focus on the new people you met, etc.

Do whatever you want to look at your life from a different angle.

What’s new this year?

1. DNA enters the game. I did a genetic test with 23andme so you’ll be able to see my ancestry, and some other cool stuff based on my DNA.
2. OKRs are the new cool kids taking over my personal objectives. OKRs? Yeah another startup thing which stands for Objective Key Results. OKRs, in the startup world, are meant to align every departments and individuals with the company’s main business objectives. You define one or more objectives which are usually ambitious and inspiring. Then in order to reach these objectives you define Key Results. They should be measurable and ambitious. I’ll use them to define my 2019 challenges you can find at the end of the report.
3. Last year I defined some TO DO so I’ll try to see if I were able to actually do the things I wanted to do.
4. The grateful category is out because it did not really sound like me but more like some bullshit articles you can read all over self-help blogs. Instead I’ll replace it with a Friend & Family section where I’ll try to reflect on the health of my relationships with friends and family.

Friends & Family 👫

TO DO 2018 (Written in 2017)
1/ see my old friends more often
2/ see my family more often
What I actually did
1/ I saw some of my friends more often because of weddings but some others way less than the previous year
2/ I saw my family just like the previous year, for summer and for Christmas. No evolution here

2018 has been a dark year when it comes to friends and family. Probably related to an intense year of work.

• I saw my parents 3 times
• My best friends in the south 4 times
• Another group of best friends from the south just once
• I barely saw some of my Parisian friends living a few minutes from where I live

Not much to say unfortunately. I’ll try to add some objectives in my 2019 OKRs because sustaining and nurturing friendships and family relations are things you can easily procrastinate about even though it should be one of the most important thing in our lives. Shame on me.

2018 challenges 🥇

TO DO 2018 (Written in 2017)
1/ find a mentor.
2/ meet and learn from other great managers.
3/ meet and learn from other great CMOs.
What I actually did
1/ I did find a great Mentor. Mike Lavigne, ex Creative Director at Frog Design and Co-founder & ex-CPO of Clue
2/ I did meet other great managers but was not able to extract great insights from those meetings. I should apply more process to this next year
3/ I did not meet any CMO :/

2018, just like 2017 as seen mostly professional challenges at comet.

I’m still learning to become a manager and a good Chief Marketing Officer.

On top of that I’m adding a new layer of skills: User Experience. I’m not talking about the common definition of UX we can encounter in the startup world but more about the overall extended experience around Product with a capital P as it goes further than just the actual frontend facing users: from acquisition, communication, and all the marketing disciplines up until product experience and everything surrounding it including one of the most important facet of it: design and content. I’m still a newbie at most of these new things but will try to learn as fast as I can in 2019.

I’m truly passionate about this new career orientation as I’m sure marketing, product, brand, and design have to be seen, just like a band or orchestra, as a unique ensemble closely working together as a complex system. And being the conductor of such an orchestra is truly an amazing experience.

Sports/Physical activities/Health 🏋️‍♀️

Weight 𐄷

Due to some technical issues with my connected scale, I do not have a nice graph of my weight over the year but my weight has been more stable than the year before:

• 59.9kg in January 2018
• 59.7kg end of December 2018
• as usual I gained weight before Summer with a peak at 62kg around May 2018

running 🏃

TO DO 2018 (Written in 2017)
1/ run an official half marathon
2/ run an official marathon
3/ run more often
4/ avoid injuries by drinking more
What I actually did
1/ Achieved it with the half marathon of Paris
2/ I did not run another marathon
3/ I did not run more often at all
4/ I kinda achieved that one but got a back injury right before the paris half marathon

• I ran 101 times in 2018 (with runs ranging from 5k to 21k), that’s almost 38% less than in 2017
• I ran a total of 629km which is 37 less than in 2017. It is more or less the same distance as a Paris → Avignon (compared to a Paris → Prague in 2017)

• I spent 55 hours running or 2.3 days
• My longest run was the half marathon of Paris (my second official race after the Marathon of Loch Ness in 2016) which I ran in 1:52:03 on the 4th of march 2018

• My fastest run of the year (which is kinda slow) was on March 29th. I ran a 5k at an average of 4min55s (35s more than the fastest one in 2017)

• I burnt around 43,882 calories running. That’s worth 219 donuts

Walking + running 🚶‍♂️

TO DO 2018 (written in 2017)
1/ walk more by stopping 2/3 metro stations before my final destination when I go to work
2/ walk more often during weekends
what I actually Did
1/ I did not do more steps but knowing that I ran way less than in 2017, I actually walked more in 2018
2/ Hard to say, but it's very likely

• In total I walked and ran a total of 4,245,807 steps or 2,634km which only is 6.5% less than in 2017. So despite running way less, I increased the number of walks. It’s equivalent to a Paris → Istanbul compared to a Paris → Moscow last year

• My walks are concentrated in the morning and around noon

• My daily average number of steps for 2018: 11,893 vs. 12,150 steps in 2017
• This year, just like the past ones, my most active months was during summer: July (vs. August in 2017). The weather has a deep impact on how much we walk, which is logical but worth mentioning. Living under the sun might make us healthier because of more physical activity. In July I walked an average of almost 15k steps/day

• Most steps on Monday, July 9 with 30,953 steps

Sleep 😴

TO DO 2018 (written in 2018)
1/ wake up in between 5:15 and 5:30am at least 3 times a week
2/ go to bed not later than 11pm when I wake up early
What I actually did in 2018
1/ I've been pretty good at this one. I usually wake up around 5:10am when I work
2/ I was not able to reach that goal. When you finish working around 7:30pm and arrive at home later than 8pm, it's hard to go to bed early as you want to spend that free time on other stuff than sleeping

• Slept approximatively 92 days in 2018 (vs. 95 days in 2017)
• Sleep quality by month

From March until July my sleep quality was pretty poor due to a pretty intense period at comet. Because of almost 2 weeks of vacations the month of December saw my sleep quality increase. As usual the month of August is the favorite one of my sleep quality as everything is more relaxed in France.

• Average time to bed

Weirdly compared to 2017, I went more consistently to bed. Around midnight. During the winter months I tend to go to bed earlier.

• Sleep quality affected by physical activity:

Just like last year, it’s pretty interesting. Either having very little activity (less than 7k steps per day) or a lot (more than 15k steps per day) seem to enhance my sleep quality. But a mild physical activity (between 7k and 15k steps per day) seems to decrease my sleep quality a tiny bit. I guess the correlation is wrong. I walk in between 7k and 15k steps per day only when I work, therefore the less-than-7k or more-than-15k days are the ones when I do not work, therefore the ones when I have more time to sleep, therefore a better quality of sleep.

Workouts 💪

In 2018 I decided to quit Freeletics and do some simpler workouts. My routine is pretty simple. 3 times a week I do:

• 100 abs
• 100 situps
• 100 pull-ups

Therefore I did last year:

• 15,600 abs
• 15,600 situps
• 15,600 pull-ups

DNA 👩‍⚕️

In February, while traveling to New York I bought a 23andme kit in order to have an ancestry and health report based on my DNA. The results where surprising :)

• I’m mostly European (59% of my DNA), ok not a surprise but the 9% (among of the 59%) were quite a surprise. I’m more Italian than I am French (only 1.5% from France and Germany)
• The second biggest influence on my DNA is from Western Asia and North Africa (36% from Western Asia. I probably had ancestors in Turkey and Iran who then moved to Armenia)

Here’s my ancestry timeline

It means that:

• One of my grandparents was 100% from Western Asia and born between 1900 and 1960 (probably the parents of my mom who were Armenian)
• One of my grandparents was 100% Iberian (probably the parents of my dad or great grandparents who sere Spanish)
• One of my 2nd or 3rd great grandparents was 100% italian
• etc.

Here’s the map of my relatives all around the world

What’s cool about this is that you can connect with them and talk to them through the 23andme platform. Great if you want to build your ancestry tree.

My Neanderthal Ancestry

As you probably already know, we, the Homo Sapiens, used to live with another species of Human (in the genus Homo): the Neanderthal. Unfortunately for them, it’s really likely that we exterminated them because (1) we did not really like them (a not really scientific hypothesis) and (2) because of our better ability to communicate and coordinate as a group (certainly through the birth of Culture, rituals, etc.) which helped us to better build better extermination processes. But, because some Homo Sapiens and Neanderthal were probably good people willing to make love, not war, the two species had some babies together, that’s why we still find some Neanderthal variants in our DNA. If you want to learn more about this read the book Sapiens: a brief history of humankind. I apologize to my scientific friends if I made some mistakes.

Thanks to 23andme, I learnt that I have 250 variants which is less than 81% of 23andme customers.

Here’s my wellness report

Here’s my health report:

Tracking my digital life 💻

TO DO 2018 (written in 2017)
1/ spend less time on slack by avoiding FOMO
2/ spend less time in Google Inbox by being more drastic regarding when I check and write my emails
What I actually did in 2018
1/ Failed
2/ Failed

• 1,840 hours or 76.7 days spent online (vs. 1,884 in 2017 or 2.3% less year over year). Merging our brain with computers does not sound that crazy anymore
• I spent 291 hours or 12.1 days on the internal Slack of comet. +54% vs last year 😱

• I spent 238 hours or almost 10 days in Gmail. +41% vs last year. It’s crazy how much more time you spend writing emails when you increase the management part of your job

• I spent 206 hours or 8.6 days in Google Spreadsheets. +55% vs last year

• I spent 134 hours or 5.2 days in Google Docs

• I spent 57 hours or 2.4 days in Gitlab

• I spent 46 hours or almost two days in notes (Apple app). -10% vs last year

• I spent 30 hours or 1.25 days in Messages (Apple app)

• 5 hours on Facebook. -88% vs. last year. Insane how I’m not using facebook anymore. I’m tending to use it a bit more lately though. Curating my feed to have only interesting articles and less crap from people or publications I don’t really know. Really curious about where facebook is moving in the total chaos they’re going through
• 4 hours on Amazon. I put that one here because it’s pretty interesting to see that I’m spending almost the same amount of time on Amazon as Facebook. It shows how much power Amazon is gaining. It has became a reflex for me to go there before buying anything

Books 📚

TO DO 2018 (written in 2017)
1/ read (or listen to) at least 20 books and audiobooks
2/ don't be afraid to stop reading a book if I don't like it
What I actually Did in 2017
1/ Failed, I should have read 9 more books to reach this goal
2/ Failed too. I did not really like Norwegian Wood but felt the urge to finish it anyway

• 11 books read, 0.92/month. 3 less than 2017
• 2783 pages read (vs. 5228 in 2017 or 47% less) or 7.6 pages/day
• Here’s the list of all the books I read

• My favorite books this year were:

→ non fiction

An amazing book for anyone willing to learn the basics of product management and how not to screw up your entire organization because of poor product processes. Buy it here (no that’s not an affiliation link 🤗)

→ Fiction

An interesting book about past civilizations told through the memories of a cryogenized survivor. If you like tales about lost, extremely advanced civilization and sci-fi, then it’s a great book for you. Here you go

other facts about books

• shortest book: The New One Minute Manager with 112 pages
• longest book: La Nuit des temps with 394 pages
• average book length: 253 pages

Travels 🗺

TO DO 2018 (written in 2017)
1/ visit at least 30 different cities
2/ go to 1 or 2 countries I've never been before
What I actually did in 2018
1/ Failed, I did half
2/ Success, I went to Canada for the first time

• 12 cities explored including new ones: Bordeaux, New York, Calvi, Toronto, Kingston, Montreal, Niagara falls, Quebec City, Rennes, Bruxelles, Antwerp, Gent
• 3 countries visited including a new one I’ve never been to before: United States, Canada, Belgium

Movies and TV shows 🎬

My favorite movie was Grave of the Fireflies

Why?

• Probably the most touching and sad movie ever made
• It makes you open your eyes about the collateral damages of war
• Just look at some of the critics

Movies data

• Watched 25 movies (-32% compared to 2017)
• About 46 hours or 2 entire days (- 39% compared to 2017)
• December: max. amount of movies watched with 5 movies
• April: min. amount of movies watched with 0 movie
• Here’s the complete list: Oss 117 Caire Nid d’espion — AlphaGo — Grave of the Fireflies — The Cloverfield paradox — Black panther — Annihilation — The Avengers Infinity War — Lego Batman — Cloverfield — The shape of the water — 3 Billboards — Deadpool 2 — Mission Impossible: fallout — Idiocracy — Lost in translation — Snowpiercer — Unbreakable — a star is born — First Man — Bohemian rhapsody — Searching… — Senses — Isle of dogs — Bandersnatch

TV Shows 📺

My favorite TV show was Maniac

My iPhone home screen at the end of the year 📱

TO DO 2018 (written in 2017)
1/ if I don't use an app for one month, delete it
What I actually did in 2018
1/ This is a fail, I always have the fear of maybe having to use an app in the near future so I keep them

Some noticeable things

• This is the year of the come back of the Telephone app. It’s here just because I’m receiving more phone calls, therefore I’m using it just to see my voice messages notifications since I usually don’t pick up the phone if I don’t know who’s calling me or if I’m in the middle of something (most likely 99% of the time). I consider my iPhone more like a computer than a phone. I still don’t understand why they’re still called “phones”
• Notes has became my top 1 app, it’s super powerful, easy to use, and always synced with all my devices (iPhone, iPad, Mac)
• Cryptocurrency app Coinbase has appeared
• As predicted last year, Flipboard has disappeared. I’m now using solely instapaper for reading articles
• Good prediction for Periscope as well. It’s gone
• Google calendar is another app I’m using more and more on my iPhone. Therefore it’s here, on my first screen

Podcasts 📻

This year, following last year’s trend, I’ve decreased my consumption of podcasts even more and replaced it with more audiobooks. But here are all the podcasts I’ve listened to:

• Reply All (Gimlet Media) → a show about the internet
• Startup (Gimlet Media) → a show about what it feels like to launch a startup
• a16z (Andreessen Horrowitz) → tech, culture, trends, the future
• The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish (Farnam Street) → The Knowledge Project Podcast explores the ideas, methods, and mental models, that help expand your mind, live deliberately, and master the best of what other people have already figured out
• Radiolab → Amazing storytelling podcast

Side Projects 📝

Happenstance

TO DO 2018 (written in 2017)
1/ develop a V0 automated version of Happenstance and start sending emails agains
What I actually did in 2018
1/ strictly nothing :( 

Sarah Marga and I launched Happenstance on Product Hunt (Check it out here) at the beginning of 2016. Just like in 2017, the project is still on hold as we need to develop the platform in order to automate everything. We have a waiting list of more than 5,000 people now. I’m sure it could be a great service. I just need to devote more time and money on this project.

Just a reminder:

We created happenstance because we wanted to meet new interesting people, with no other purpose than sharing thoughts, ideas, and life experience. We had that burning desire to expand our world, and to discover the lives and adventures of other people we don’t know yet. Although internet is pretty great for finding jobs, dates, and old friends, there is no service that would allow us to meet some random people, who are obviously cool and curious just like you (and us).

With Happenstance, we want to allow everyone to meet someone new and different, but yet kind of similar. Maybe a teacher from Japan, or a student in Europe, or a traveler in Asia, or a journalist from Africa, or a gardener, or a dentist, or an archeologist, or a professional gamer, or…well you get it.

Unmakr

TO DO 2018 (written in 2017)
1/ publish 5 new tear downs
2/ share it with some press to get some coverage
What I actually did in 2018
1/ We published only 1 new tear down
2/ Did not do anything, we need a more compelling approach. My idea is to focus on iconic projects and interview the teams who were behind them (product managers, designers, engineers, etc.)

Unmakr is still alive. Kinou (AKA Christophe) and I started a project called Unmakr where we pick our favorite iconic objects and we tear them apart to see their guts. Last year we shot 1different object (the Sound Sticks II by Harman Kardon). You can follow us on medium or on Instagram.

Music 🎶

• My favorite artist of the year: Still the Beatles

• 22,174 minutes listened, or 15.4 days (0.45% more than 2018). The interesting fact about this is that 40% of my time spent listening to music was through my Amazon Echo at home
• here’s my top 100 songs playlist on spotify
• Since 2016 I track my music by creating monthly playlist. Every time I like a song a lot I add it to my playlist. You can find all of them on my spotify profile:

Yoann Lopez

My favorite articles of the year 📰

Can relationship anarchy create a world without heartbreak?

What if we could approach romantic love, friendship, and all our love related relationships differently in order to get out of the perpetual pain these all create?

Other articles worth your time:

• How we make decision at Coinbase (medium)
• Dr. Elon & Mr. Musk: Life inside Tesla’s Production Hell (wired)
• Creativity in Management by John Cleese (James Clear blog)
• The Generalized Specialist: How Shakespeare, Da Vinci, and Kepler excelled

My Key Learnings in 2018 🤓

During 2018 I read many books, articles, listened to some podcasts and audiobooks. Each time I ran into some great quotes, ideas, concepts, I wrote them down in a Note folder on my iPhone. Now it’s time for me to share them with the world as some of them might be useful for you.

Random stuff 🎲

• In 2018 I drank 234 liters of beer (- 32% compared to last year)
• Month I drank the most beers: May with 24 liters
• Month I drank the least beers: January with 12 liters
• I cut my nails 35 times (- 17% compared to 2017) or once every 10.4 days → 2018 has been a year where I’ve been quite tired and less healthy (did not eat well enough, did less sport, slept less, worked more) therefore I’m sure it has affected the health of my nails and probably my overall health. For some reasons I started to track this weird thing but I should read more about what’s behind nails’ growth and how it can be a proxy of your overall health
• My Codex Vitae or “book of life” is now updated→ Yoann’s Codex Vitae

My 2019 Objectives 🔮

As I said before, I’ll use the OKRs method to design, follow, and achieve my 2019 objectives. Some are short terms goals, others are long terms one that will keep showing up year over year (like the financial independence for instance).

As a reminder, OKR stands for Objectives & Key Results. Objectives should be ambitious and inspiring, they’re what you want to achieve. For instance: Enhance your overall health. Key Results should be ambitious and measurable. They are the different things you have to achieve to reach your objectives. For instance, in order to enhance your overall health you’ll have to:

• Exercise 3 times per week or 156 times a year
• 4 days/week without alcohol or 156 days cold turkey
• etc.

You can check, comment, or copy my OKRs spreadsheet if you want to do the same for you. Here it is. Otherwise here are the screenshot of my OKRs:

✨ BONUS — HOW TO WRITE YOUR OWN YEAR IN REVIEW ✨

Here’s a quick guide on how I collect and write my year in review.

YEAR IN REVIEW - HOW TO + APP I'M USING AND THEIR PRICE $$
1/ I use my iPhone XS (€1,250), my Apple watch (€350), and my Macbook Pro (€1,500)
2/ For tracking my weight I’m using a Withings health scale (€100) paired with the Gyroscope app (€60/year)
3/ For tracking my runs I use the coach.me app (free) + runkeeper go(€30/year) paired with Gyroscope
4/ For tracking my sleep I use the Sleep Cycle (free) app on my iPhone
5/ For tracking the books I read, I'm using Goodreads (free). Which is also great to save books you want to read later or discovering new ones + spreadsheets 
6/ For tracking my travels I use gyroscope, and from this year on, also spreadsheets
7/ For tracking the movies I watch, I'm using a simple Google Spreadsheet (free)
8/ For tracking my TV show, I'm using the TV time iPhone app (free).
9/ For tracking and listening to my podcasts, I'm using the Overcast iPhone app (free) + spreadsheets
10/ For tracking my music I'm using the Spotify year in Review + its integration with Gyroscope
11/ For tracking my digital activity (app/website usage on my mac), I'm using Rescue Time (free) paired with Gyroscope
12/ For tracking random stuff like my beer consumption I'm using a simple Google Spreadsheet (free) that I'm filling out every day
13/ For tracking my OKRs, I'm going to use also a simple spreadsheet
13/ At the end of December I gather all the data in a note saved on the Mac Notes app, then I start writing this medium article. It usually takes me a week or two to finish it.
14/ For each data, in 2018, I've started to see what actions I could trigger based on what I've collected. It'll be the basis of my personal OKRs you can find here
15/ I did my DNA analysis through 23andme (about $200) the health part is only available in the US. In France you can get only the ancestry report.

If you have any question, don’t hesitate to shoot me an email at yo@yoann.co

Happy 2019!