My annual round-up of the year just gone (you can read 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021‘s reports). This was very much a transitional year as I moved from working part time to retirement at the end of August. I haven’t fully retired yet as I am still doing some consultancy but my daily rhythm has certainly changed and that has impacted the stats below.
Data for this report has as ever been taken from a number of sources including Exist, last.fm, Audible, Swarm, RescueTime and a couple of spreadsheets that I keep. However, the phrase “Lies, damned lies, and statistics” very much applies here.
Healthily
Less steps taken, less distance walked, less energy burned. I have no idea why this is the case as I now actually have more time to exercise that I did previously. I also feel that I spent more time exercising as I regularly played table tennis in the first half of the year until an elbow injury put paid to that. However, the numbers do not lie (or do they?) and so I really need to up my game in 2023.
Bookishly
I “read” roughly as many books in 2022 as I did in 2021. The previous two years (2019 & 2020) may well be anomalies caused by Covid and the lockdowns. I do remember listening to more audiobooks as I pushed a pushchair round carrying my dozing granddaughter.
This year’s lack of reading has more to do with a general malaise. I just wasn’t feeling like reading at all so I didn’t. That’s a situation that would be very alien to my wife. I do intend to try and read more this year.
The full list of books I read can be found here.
Musically
Having music on while I worked used to be a great thing for me and I would get through vast quantities of it. I found that it helped me both concentrate and relax. No longer being sat at a desk during the working day means that there is less opportunity to listen. Once again then the most listened list has been dominated by Lindsey Buckingham who I like but this statistic has been created very much by my wife who blares him out while cleaning! We were due to see Buckingham in concert this year and were very much looking forward to it but he was ill so the date was moved to while we were away on holiday so couldn’t go. 😢
As you can see below my favourite album was The Amazons “How will I know if heaven will find me?” and I’m glad that this has been reflected in the statistics as I really feel that I have put the hours in listening to it!
One of the most interesting gigs I attended this year was seeing the aforemention The Amazons playing an accoustic set in the Oxfam Music shop in Reading which was slightly incongruous but good fun.
You can see what I am playing and more listening stats over at last.fm.
Moviely
Lots of films watched this year as I filled some gaps in my movie history. This meant watching some great films such as Bullitt, Westworld, The Magnificent Seven and The Usual Suspects. I did this by buying the DVDs which are so ridiculously cheap these days. For a quid you can get some real classics.
I also went to the cinema a lot more this year for two reasons. Firstly I had a lot more time due to retirement. This meant I could go during the day and I often went to 11am screenings where I would either be the only person and one of a handful there. The other reason was because I was gifted an annual pass for the excellent Reading Biscuit Factory. All of this meant that I went to see all sorts of films in genres that I wouldn’t normally consider – Nope for example. I really enjoyed these outings so I will be continuing this into the new year.
The full list of films I’ve been watching can be found here.
Productively
Given that I have supposedly retired the idea of what is “productive” has shifted over the year. I used to measure my productive time using the tool Rescue Time but how can a tool like that help when what is now productive is not in front of a computer? I would consider spending time with my granddaughters as productive but that’s not something any tool can measure and, to be honest, I’d consider that time more valuable anyway.
I have included to the task count from Remember the Milk partly because this is the 13th year that I have these stats. I pretty much run my whole life on RTM so it is perhaps unsurprising that the number of tasks completed has remained pretty much static for the last few years.
Socially
Twitter is still my most used social network even though I have been slightly put off by the direction that Musk seems to be taking it. Still the conversations I have there are broadly positive and nobody called me an “entitled c**t” as happened to me on Reddit this year! I am also on Mastodon but that still hasn’t reached a critical mass to make it useful yet in my experience.
While I like Twitter I find Reddit to be more useful as the themed subreddits allow you to tailor your interests rather than the scatter gun approach of Twitter. This has allowed me to tap in to the knowledge of people on topics as diverse as PC hard drives through to robotic lawnmowers. It can be a much more successful approach than a Google search (other search engines are available and I recommend and use the privacy focused DuckDuckGo)
The tweet that got the most engagement for me this year was one about two rather depressing books I read looking at politics and law making in the UK and how they are both pretty broken. Sobering reads both and others obviously also felt the same.
Best Of
New for 2022! I thought it would be good to take a look at what my best book, film and music was for the year.
Some of these were pretty easy to choose. For example I just loved The Amazons ‘How will I know if heaven will find me?‘ and so that was an easy pick for my record of the year. I have played it so many times this year and it still sounds fresh. Those that know me well will be wondering perhaps why I didn’t choose either “An Hour Before It’s Dark” by Marillion or “Closure / Continuation” by Porcupine Tree, both bands that I love. Simply it’s because neither are as good as their previous works and not as good as the Amazons.
For gigs there is a much smaller pool to choose from this year as I only attended four but here there is once again one stand out winner: ABBA Voyage. It was stunning and just so incredibly uplifting. Some will argue that it’s not really a concert in the true sense and they will be the people that haven’t been.
My favourite book af the year isn’t available as a traditional book at all which is a great shame as it is terrific and more people should be able to read it. I am talking about “Who do I think I am?” by Mark Steel which charts the search for his biological parents. It’s a fascinating listen and an amazing story that you just would not associate with Steel. A close second was the already mentioned Isabel Hardman’s “Why We Get The Wrong Politicians” a slightly depressing look at the UK’s policital system.
Finally, films and here it shows that quantity does not equal quality given that I watched over 80 films and very few of them left any mark on me. I am aware, of course, that I choose what to watch and so I could choose more high brow films but where’s the fun in that?!
The two films I have chosen were both released in 2022 so I have excluded old films that I saw for the first time and enjoyed, such as The Usual Suspects. Both films were slightly off beat and quirky which will have meant that they won’t have been seen by a mainstream audience. The first is “Licorice Pizza” which is a slow burn love story. The second is CODA (Children of Deaf Adults) which follows the story of a girl who is the only one in her family that can hear and how acting as her familys ears could hold her back. CODA is available to stream on Apple TV+ and Licorice Pizza can be bought or streamed.
And the worst? Avatar 2 by a country mile. Too long and without any meaningful story.
And Finally…
So there it is my 2022 in numbers and graphs. And here, according to Exist, is my average day.
