The YOLO Report 2019

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YO.LO

31 min readJan 13, 2020

Welcome to my fifth YOLO report. 2019 is over and I am now 32.599285635 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 previous year, reflect on this, and try to use it to build the next year’s objectives.

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

Why the name YOLO? YOLO stands for YOann LOpez. For a while now, YOLO has become one of my nicknames with my friends.

Why this Year-in-Review Report?

For most people, I’m just a freak, for others, this report can be a source of inspiration. For me, taking a step back and looking at what I’ve done in a year is some kind of self-therapy and a good way to see what went badly, and how I can improve

I could keep this to myself but putting it in front of the entire world is (i) a way for me to feel some peer pressure, therefore, to try to achieve my goals (ii) maybe inspire others to do the same thing, and (iii) just for fun.

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. It’s too easy to forget about all the things happening to you. As The Beatles would say, writing about what happens in your life could help you:

Keeping an eye on the world going by [your] window.

So welcome to this fifth edition!

Table of Content

What’s New This Year?

Friends & Family.

Sports/Physical Activities/Health.

Tracking my Digital Life.

Books

Travels

Movies and TV Shows

My iPhone Screen at the End of the Year

My Key Learnings in 2019

Bonus: How to Write Your Own Year in Review

What’s new this year?

I’ll check how my first OKR (Objective and Key Results) went. Spoiler alert. I was quite optimistic last year! A little reminder about the OKR if you don’t know what it means: OKR, in the business world, are meant to align every department 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. These Key Results should be measurable and ambitious.
I will add a finance section. Investments, spendings, etc. I’ll try to share some learnings and tips with you.
I’ve added an article section. With all the articles I read this year.

Friends & Family 👫

Here is the related OKR:

2018 was a bad year when it comes to my relationships with friends and family (in terms of the number of times I saw them). 2019 was even worse.

I saw my parents 2 times.
My best friends in the south 3 times.
Another group of best friends from the south not even once 😟.
I barely saw some of my Parisian friends living a few minutes from where I live.

Even though my friends in the South of France or my parents live only 3.5 hours from Paris (where I work and live), I did not manage to see them very often. The Parisian life seems to be a big black hole absorbing your free time. Even friends in Paris are hard to meet on a regular basis. When I was living in the South of France, seeing my friends was way easier for some reason. Maybe fewer things to do, so more free time to see them? Maybe less chaos allowing a more relaxed life? I don’t know but once again, I’ll try to do better this year!

Sports/Physical activities/Health 🏋️‍♀️

Weight 𐄷

At the beginning of the year, I was 60.1kg.

And at the end of the year around 58kg.

It’s funny how I lose weight systematically by the end of the year. Summer months are always the months I weigh the most. I am not sure why. One possible explanation is that I skip more dinners in winter because of shorter days. Maybe my internal clock is extremely influenced by the sun. And my hunger as well? Maybe I should track my level of hunger and find some correlations with daylight levels.

And here’s my weight graph for the past 8 years:

There’s clearly a downward trend. Surely due to more intense running than muscle building these past 3 years.

I’d like to reach an average of 62/63 kilograms this year by combining running at the same level with more muscle-building activities.

running 🏃

This year my running training was designed to run my second marathon, which was also an objective in my personal OKR.

I ran 121 times with runs ranging from 5k to 42k. Almost 20% more runs than in 2018.

I ran a total of 1,140 kilometers or 81% more than in 2018. This is almost the distance from Paris to Florence.
I ran my second Loch Ness marathon, which is also my third official race on the 6th of October 2019. This was my longest run of the year with 42.03 kilometers in 4:06:44 (Runkeeper stats). I was pretty disappointed as I ran my first marathon in 3:52:52 3 years before. I highly recommend anyone to run a marathon to do the Loch Ness Marathon. It’s cheap (the race itself but also the trip), it’s beautiful, it’s a pretty easy terrain, and way less crowded than other races. Here are some pics:

Fun fact: I burnt 2725 calories during this race. About 5 big macs or 24 cookies. It shows you how much effort you need to counterbalance your junk food intake…
I ran a total of 110 hours or 4.6 straight days.

My fastest run (which is kinda slow) was on the 14th of October. 5k in 23 minutes.

June was my most active month with 190km run.

May was my least active month with only 34km run (I was on vacations for more than 2 weeks).

Most of my runs are concentrated in the morning even though I ran way more in the afternoon compared to the previous year.

I burnt 79,658 calories running in 2019 compared to 43,882 or 81% more. This is also equal to 147 big macs.

This does not seem a lot for 110 hours of running

Walking + running 🚶‍♂️

In total, I walked and ran a total of 4,787,370 steps or 2,970 kilometers. This is almost 13% more than in 2018, and almost a Paris → Moscow trip.

This year my walks are more evenly distributed. But still. Most of them happened in the morning. It makes sense as I usually work during the day.
My daily average number of steps for 2019: 13,080 vs. 11,893 in 2018. Around 10% more steps per day.

This year, just like the past ones, my most active month was during summer: August. 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 more than 15k steps/day.

My least active month was in November with only 313,757 steps but still, a more than recommended daily average with 10,479 steps/day.
Without any big surprise, the day I did the most steps was during the Marathon: 10/6/2019 with 48,890 steps.

Sleep 😴

I slept around 98 days in 2019 so 6 more days than in 2018.

My sleep quality did not really improve in 2019 except for the summer period. Otherwise, it remains at more or less the same level. Just a tiny bit better because of the higher quality of sleep during the second half of 2019. This is probably due to the fact that I moved way closer to my job, allowing me to sleep more without sacrificing my early mornings. A quick tip: move closer to your job or just work remotely. 😉

Average time to bed: in 2019 I went to bed, on average, a bit later than in 2018 with the same nice peak during summer.

The average time to bed per day is pretty interesting as well. It goes almost crescendo from Sunday to Saturday.

In 2019, I fell asleep quite faster than in 2018. It’s hard to say why. Maybe less stress? One thing is sure. I fall asleep quite fast with an average of 10 minutes to fall sound asleep.

The average time to fall asleep per day is also interesting. It’s almost the exact opposite of my average time to bed. The later I go to bed, the faster I fall asleep. It’s quite rational when you think about it.

I try to wake up around 5:30 am on weekdays, but some days, if I go out, I don’t force myself to wake up and I sleep more. Therefore, I wake up on average around 6 am on weekdays and around 9 am on weekends.

Workouts 💪

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

100 abs.
100 situps.
100 pull-ups.

Therefore I did last year around:

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

This year I’ll try to mix this very basic workout with more exercises like deadlifts or squats in order to gain 2 to 3 kilos of muscle.

DNA 👩‍⚕️

In 2018 I did a DNA test with 23andme in New York City (mainly because they have the health part in the US while it’s forbidden for them to sell it in France.). Since then, they’ve adjusted my results, which I find amazing. Here’s what has changed.
I lost 10% of DNA from Europe so I’m now basically 50% European (mainly Southern Europe), and 50% Western Asian & North African (mainly from Iranian, Caucasian and Mesopotamian).

For a reminder here’s the one from last year, side by side with the new one.

Here’s my ancestry timeline updated as well

It means that:

One of my grandparents was 100% from Iran or the region. Probably 100% Armenian as my mother’s name is Aydjian (name ending in ian are usually Armenian). They were born between 1900 and 1960 (for sure 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 were Spanish: Lopez).
One of my 2nd or 3rd great grandparents was 100% Italian.
etc.

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

What’s cool about 23andme (and probably other services like it), is that you can connect with your relatives and talk to them through the 23andme’s platform. It’s an amazing tool if you want to build your ancestry tree.

My Neanderthal Ancestry

This hasn’t changed since last year so I’ll just copy-paste what I wrote in 2018.

As you probably already know, We, the Homo Sapiens Species, 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 of our better ability to communicate and coordinate as a group (certainly through the birth of Culture, rituals, etc.), which helped us to build better strategies to conquer new territories and kill these rivals. 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 learned that I have 250 variants which is a smaller number than 80% of 23andme customers.

Here’s my wellness report:

Here’s my updated health report:

Tracking my Digital Life 💻

This, 👆, does not take into account my iPhone usage.

I spent 1,564 hours, or 62.5 days online (vs. 1,840 in 2018 or 15% less year over year). If I want to make a safe assumption, I’d say that I’d spent about 4 hours per day on my iPhone so 1,460 hours in total phone time. This would increase my total online time in 2019 to 3,024 hours or 126 days online. That sounds crazy 😱.

I spent 195 hours or about 8 days communicating on the internal slack of comet (mainly). About 50% less than last year. Certainly due to the fact that the size of my team at comet drastically decreased in 2019.

according to RescueTime, I spent 225 hours on emails (superhuman + Gmail) or about 9 days. 6% less than in 2018.

In 2019, I spent way more time on Linkedin, especially from September on, when I started a new strategy of communication on Linkedin for comet. I spent 149 hours on the social network. This is equivalent to about 6 days.

I spent 115 hours or about 5 days on Gdoc. 16% less than in 2018.

And 102 hours on Gsheet (about 4 days). 50% less than in 2018. We moved many tools from Gsheet to other software at comet. This is one reason, and the other one might be because my job changed and relied less on working on Gsheet by the end of the year. You can see the shift starting in August.

I spent 52 hours or about 2 days in Notes (Apple app). 13% more than in 2018.
I spent only 2 hours on Facebook. 60% less than in 2018 (in 2018 I had a drop of 88% usage compared to 2017).

Books 📚

Here are the related OKR:

As you can see, I failed quite hard. I reached only 40% of my objectives.

12 books read. Exactly 1/month. 1 more than in 2018. 🤷‍♂️
3,338 pages read. 17% more than in 2018. About 9 pages per day. It shows you that you do not need to read a lot to reach a decent number of books read in a year.
Here’s the list of all the books I read:

My favorite books this year were:

→ non-fiction:

I really loved that book, which shows you that other kinds of corporate organizations are possible. Of course, everything has to be taken with a grain of salt. Nothing is black or white. There are as many kinds of org as there are organizations. But, this book is an amazing way to open up your mind about this topic. Here it is.

→ Fiction

OK, this is not exactly a fiction since it’s a real story but when you read it you feel like you’re in a fiction. A real-life political thriller about an American financier in the Wild East of Russia, the murder of his principled young tax attorney, and his dangerous mission to expose the Kremlin’s corruption. Truly, truly amazing. Here it is.

Others facts about books this year:

The shortest book was The Possession with 62 pages.
The longest book was Red Notice with 402 pages.
The average book length this year was 278 pages compared to 253 pages in 2018.

Travels 🗺

17 cities explored including new ones: Florence (Italy), Salers (France), Santa Cruz (USA), Monterey (USA), Los Angeles (USA), San Diego (USA), Williams (USA), Sonoma (USA), San Francisco (USA), Guise (France), Saint-Malo (France), Calvi (France), Gent (Belgium), Edinburgh (UK), Inverness (UK), Aberdeen (UK), Berlin (Germany).
5 countries visited: USA, Italy, Belgium, Scotland, Germany.

I did quite badly regarding my travel objectives in 2019.

I did not visit a single new country.

Movies and TV shows 🎬

My favorite movie was (like many of you): Joker

Why?

No need to say how good Joaquin Phoenix was.
I’ve rarely seen such an awkward atmosphere in a movie before.
The Original Soundtrack is just amazing.

My favorite documentary was: Apollo 11

This one is just wow…I’ve never seen a documentary where you just feel like you’re there. Almost no voice over, just archive images that feel like you’re watching a SpaceX launch, but this actually happened 51 years ago! Just watch the trailer to see what I mean:

Movies data

Watched 21 movies (-16% compared to 2018)
About 42 hours or 2 entire days.
May: max. amount of movies watched with 3 movies.
August: min. amount of movies watched with 0 movies.
Here’s the complete list: Bird Box, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, Roma, vice, Captain Marvel, Adrift, Avengers end game, The Green Book, Baby driver, Mortal engines, John wick, John wick II, Yesterday, Apollo 11, Ad Astra, Joker, Return to Zombieland, Knives Out, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Star Wars — The Last Jedi, John Wick III.

TV Shows 📺

My favorite TV show was The Morning Show.

Why?

Amazing actors. Jennifer Aniston, Steve Carell, and Reese Witherspoon are just great.
Smart dialogues and use of a very very touchy theme: the #metoo movement.
One of the best season Finale of these last few years. The only ones beating it, for me, were the finales of the last season of Six Feet Under and Breaking Bad.

My iPhone Home Screen at the End of the Year 📱

Side by side this year vs. last year:

Some noticeable things

Welcome, Revolut. Never thought I’d use a banking app so often!
Bye-bye Gmail and welcome Superhuman!
Bye-bye Phone app. I now send all the unknown calls directly to voicemail.
Welcome, Linkedin. I’m using Linkedin way more often for my work.
Notion and Notes are slowly replacing Evernote. Feeling a bit sad as I was really in love with Evernote a few years ago. They’ve truly missed something.
Twitter and Instagram have replaced Facebook.

Podcasts 📻

I listened to quite a lot of podcasts this year. Here’s the list:

Reply All (Gimlet Media) → a show about the internet.
a16z (Andreessen Horrowitz) → tech, culture, trends, the future.
American Innovations → Great stories about great American Innovators.
The Art of Product → A podcast about product management.
Generation Do It Yourself → A french podcast mainly covering French entrepreneurs.
Good People → A podcast made by the French Healthcare Insurance Alan about…good people :).
Making Sense → A great podcast about the complexity of the human mind.
Masters of Scale → Amazing podcast by Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of Linkedin about Blitzscaling companies.
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.
La Martingale → A french podcast about personal finance and especially how to invest your money.

Side Projects 📝

Here are the related OKR:

Regarding learning new stuff through side projects I did manage to work on new ones but did not work on old ones 😟.

The unplanned baby: Behind the Curtain

I recently launched my newsletter on the amazing Substack platform called Behind the Curtain. The idea is simple. Create a community of people passionate about building companies, and willing to have a more Human-centered approach to doing business.

Wanna subscribe? Here you go → https://behindthecurtain.substack.com

Some stats and facts.

Date launched (subscriptions opened): 27th of October 2019.
Size of the community: 1,628 persons

First issue: Remote work at comet & How to screw up your OKRs.
Number of issues: 2.
Main source of acquisition: Linkedin.
Average open-rate: 55% (not really relevant with so little issues).

INDb

So what’s INDb? The fans of movies will recognize the reference to IMDb, the Internet Movie Database. One of the best resources regarding movies.

INDb stands for the Internet Newsletter Database. I’ve decided to build the IMDb of newsletters for many reasons:

Because I love Newsletters.
Because it could be a great way for people to discover new authors.
Because it could be a great way for authors to attract new readers.
Because it could become a marketplace. Marketers looking for newsletters to sponsor and authors looking for sponsorship.

Stay tuned.

For the curious, I’ll use a no-code tool called Adalo to build this, and share my progress in my newsletter: https://behindthecurtain.substack.com/

Happenstance

Sarah Marga and I launched Happenstance on Product Hunt (Check it out here) at the beginning of 2016. Just like in 2017, 2018, and 2019, the project is still on hold as we need 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 to this project.

Since 2016 the tech landscape has tremendously evolved. More and more no-code tools have seen the light and I’m sure we could automate this service through one of these tools.

Just a reminder about what is happenstance:

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

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 observe their guts. Last year we did not do anything. You can still follow us on medium or on Instagram.

One way I’d like to make this project evolve is to also interview a product manager, project manager, or developer who’s worked on the product we’re unmaking, and to learn a bit more about what happened behind the curtain 😉.

Music 🎶

My favorite artist of the year: Still the Beatles.
I listened to 45,442 minutes of music or 31.5 days. That’s almost twice as much as last year (22,174 minutes).
My top artists this year are…Angèle, The Pirouettes, Billie Eilish, Thérapie TAXI, and Pomme…Looks like I’ve turned into a teenager 😱.
Here’s the playlist of my 2019 top songs.
Since 2016 I track my music by creating monthly playlists. 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

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Articles of the Year 📰

As you can see I reached 62% of my objectives, which was to read 1 article/day. I read 229 articles instead. Here’s the entire list.

My favorite articles were:

business

The lesson to unlearn: by the legendary Paul Graham. This eye-opening article might show you why our educational (and therefore business) system is broken. Little hint. We’ve been trained to hack tests. Not to solve problems. These thoughts are not only a great source of knowledge for anybody interested in education but also for any entrepreneurs and managers. Now I realize that not studying for my exams, and focusing on understanding and reading a little bit every day my courses was probably a good strategy.
How to Kickstart and Scale a Marketplace Business: by Lenny Rachitsky. OK, this one is massive. It’s gigantic but you’ll learn a lot about business in general, and especially about marketplaces. You’ll get access to many insiders’ tips from successful startups like Airbnb, Uber, Thumbtack, Patreon…Even if you’re not in the marketplace business, worth a read. You’ll learn things.
Isaac Asimov Asks, “How Do People Get New Ideas?” This one blew my mind. It’ll probably influence my future self for a long time. I think it’ll even be part of my knowledge foundations. Very few writings/ideas reach this place. But, it’s simplicity and potential impact is infinite.

When I first became involved in the project, I suggested that Isaac Asimov, who was a good friend of mine, would be an appropriate person to participate. He expressed his willingness and came to a few meetings. He eventually decided not to continue, because he did not want to have access to any secret classified information; it would limit his freedom of expression. Before he left, however, he wrote this essay on creativity as his single formal input. This essay was never published or used beyond our small group. When I recently rediscovered it while cleaning out some old files, I recognized that its contents are as broadly relevant today as when he wrote it. It describes not only the creative process and the nature of creative people but also the kind of environment that promotes creativity.

Others:

How to Configure Your iPhone to Work for You, Not Against You: by the founder of the coach.me app: Coach Tony.

The iPhone could be an incredible tool, but most people use their phone as a life-shortening distraction device.
However, if you take the time to follow the steps in this article you will be more productive, more focused, and — I’m not joking at all — live longer.

This article helped me to learn many tricks like → send the caller directly to voicemail if their number is not in your phonebook. Or, add a blackish wallpaper in order to save battery.

PLEASE READ THIS ARTICLE 👆

My Key Learnings in 2019 🤓

During 2019 I read some 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.

My Personal Finance 💰

OK, this section is new so please be indulgent. I did not have a lot of time to extract data, make it beautiful, etc. It’s pretty raw.

First here are the OKR I set for myself last year:

I did quite well and managed to save the money I wanted to save.

Breakdown

Here’s the breakdown of my spendings and revenues:

Some stuff to highlight.

I made almost 39k euros after taxes. This includes my salary (€2,800/month) and the money I made when I had two trucks that I rented on Getaround. I made more or less 34k with my salary after taxes and about 5k after taxes with the trucks (I stopped renting them around May).
I managed to save more than half of my salary: 21k€. More about that later
For those wondering what amortization is, it’s money I put on the side for stuff I know I will replace. For instance, when I buy an iPhone, I put around 60€ per month on the side because I know that I’ll sell my iPhone for about 600€ in one year and getting a new one will cost me around 1,200€, and if I have more money because I sold my previous iPhone for more than €600, I just use it as an insurance if I break my phone. The possibility to create vaults with Revolut is a great feature for this usage:

I spent more money eating at restaurants than buying groceries. Quite normal for someone living in Paris.
Rent and bills are by far my two largest sources of cash burn with respectively 12k and 7k spent on those.
I spent more on books than on medical expenses. I’m very lucky to be living in France with such great public medical coverage.
I spent more than 1,000€ on mobility (basically uber and trains within France).

Investments

I love to build things. To build things you need time and resources. To get time and resources you need money. To earn money you need to work and get a salary, to invest money, to create value in exchange for money, or to borrow money. I like to mix em all. Luckily, I’ve got a pretty decent salary allowing me to save money and to invest that money.

What I’m investing in?

Public Stocks.
Managed fund (Yomoni).
Private Equity.
Real-estate.
Cars and trucks.
Others.

Public stocks

Each month, I buy some stocks. Basically based on companies I love, and I believe in. So far after more than 5 years, it has paid off. I want to highlight the fact that it’s some money I’m willing to lose in its entirety. I’m not putting anything at risk here. So be careful if you want to start doing this. It’s far from being risk-free.

at the beginning of 2019, my portfolio was worth 15,652€

In December 2019 it was worth 26,410€

Since the beginning of my public stock investment, my portfolio has increased by close to 136%. The portfolio is mainly driven up by Apple and Tesla. GoPro was not a smart investment :/ -93%.

Managed Fund (Yomoni)

I highly recommend anybody who wants to invest without the hassle of picking stocks to use a service like Yomoni. First, you tell them which risk you’re ready to take, then they will invest your money for you. Everything is transparent. Ask me for a referral code if you want to open an account ;) you can make some bucks (and me too!).

I try to put around €200–400 per month on this less risky fund. Here is their performance so far:

In 2019, the portfolio increased by 18.75%, which is way better than any regular savings account.

Private Equity

This investment is the riskiest one. I put 5k to buy some comet’s stocks when we raised our Series A. I truly believe in the potential of this company and its team, but still, it’s alway riskier than investing in some other investments.

Real Estate

About 4 years ago I bought a flat in Paris with my ex-girlfriend. We kept it for a while and sold it this year. I made around 20k after taxes.
This year I launched a real-estate operation with friends to buy a building in the south of France. I’ll tell you more about it next year :)

Cars and Trucks

WTF?! you must be saying to yourself :)

One day I received an email from my bank offering me a 0.95% loan. I said to myself: “well, that’s basically free money if you can find an investment which is > 0.95%”. After a few thoughts, I decided to buy two old trucks of La Poste (French postal service) and I rented them on Getaround, a peer-to-peer rental car platform.

Each truck made between 400 and 700 euros per month (€800–€1,400 in total).

It ended out being a great investment as I paid only €350 per month for the loan. Of course, you need to add the cleaning of the trucks and some repairs but at the end of the day, it was a great investment.

I sold the truck because they were getting too old, but I’m planning to buy 2 cars and 1 truck in January in order to increase my available income to travel more and to save more.

Others

I’ve got some crypto (mainly Bitcoins and Ethereum).
I bought 5 Saturn V lego rockets. 1 for me, and 4 to sell in a few years when the kit will be retired. Also bought 4 London red buses (Lego as well). Legos can be great investments. If you want to read more about it, you can read this article: Lego bricks outshine gold bars as investments, study finds.

Random stuff 🎲

In 2019 I drank 238 liters of beer (+ 2% compared to last year).
The month I drank the most beers: July with 30.5 liters.
The month I drank the least beers: November with 11.75 liters.
I cut my nails 33 times (- 6% compared to 2018) or once every 10 days → 2019 has been a year where I’ve been quite tired and less healthy (did not eat well enough, did not sleep very well…), therefore I’m sure it has affected the health of my nails and probably my overall health. For some reason 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 (I keep saying this every year).
My Codex Vitae or “book of life” is now updated→ Yoann’s Codex Vitae.

My 2019 Objectives 🔙

Let’s see what happens in 2019 regarding my personal OKRs:

I reached only a bit more than 51% completion. I guess I was way too ambitious. As usual.

I did extremely well financially. Reached all my objectives and even more.

I did quite well here. I managed to finish my marathon but did not do better than the first one. 4h05min vs 3h50min.

Here’s it’s not bad but not perfect either. I ate too much meat. I can’t wait for companies like Beyond Meat or Impossible Food (plant-based meat) to be widely available in France. Regarding my exercise, I did extremely well. I smoke too much once again…Will try to buy a Juul in order to avoid smoking real tobacco. My drinking habits are quite dangerous. I should decrease my consumption of alcohol. I do not binge drink but I drink 1 or 2 drinks basically every day of the week.

Here I managed to finish one book about drawing but not the second one. I also did not manage to learn how to perfectly use Procreate (drawing app on the iPad). Here are some time-lapses of some drawings I did on my iPad with Procreate:

I did quite well regarding the number of articles I read. Very poorly regarding the number of books read, and extremely poorly regarding the masterclasses Mooc I was supposed to watch. Masterclass is a good product, the classes are nice but quite time-consuming. Also sometimes it just scratches the surface of a topic.

Here I just did not find the time to learn more about Tarot. But I’ll do better this year hopefully.

Nonthing much to say here. I just did very poorly. Shame on me.

Just too much procrastination here.

I managed to launch a new side project but did not finish the old ones. Not good. I thought a lot about new concepts (education, transportation, economics…), but did not write anything down.

Maybe not enough money for that one :)

Haha, 5 new tattoos?! What did I think about when I wrote that?! I did manage to get a new one though (see picture below. It represents the Tarot card “The Star”.).

Here I did quite well. I sold my flat and managed to make quite a good profit, I sold my 2 trucks that I was renting. But, I did not try to get rid of some possessions that I do not really use in my daily life.

My 2020 Objectives 🔮

As I said before, I’ll use the OKRs method to design, follow, and achieve my 2020 objectives. Some are short terms goals, others are long terms ones 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 are 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 they are. Otherwise here are the screenshots 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.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.14/ For tracking my OKRs, I'm using a simple Gsheet (free).15/ For tracking my personal finance I use a spreadsheet. Here's a tutorial + the template of the Gsheet I use to track my budget + expenses.15/ 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.16/ 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 here17/ 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 questions, remarks, or just want to tell me what you thought about this, don’t hesitate to shoot me an email at yo@yoann.co

Happy 2020 everybody.

Thanks for reading!