2024 recap through some apps
The year comes to an end in a few hours, and some of the digital services and apps that I use on a daily basis started nudging me as early as one month ago about my various stats and achievements throughout 2024, with the hope that I'd boost them on social media. I'm old school and prefer blogs to walled gardens, and since I have not been writing here much as of late, I thought I'd use those stats as a way to recap my year.
So here go four apps I use a lot, and my “achievements” on them during the year — in increasing order of importance to me.
Remember The Milk (tasks)
I completed 444 tasks this year. This is not very meaningful because some of those “tasks” were reminders of various sorts, and because I track tasks in more than one place anyway (eg, on a notebook on my reMarkable).
I have grown a bit frustrated with RTM because both the web interface and the Android app seem frozen in time (there have been no noticeable improvements in the last years; not even a face lift). I paid a subscription for a few years, but nowadays I don't see the justification for that. RTM does what I need alright, but barely that.
Duolingo (language studying)
I didn't even remember that I started the year with a fresh streak of studying Japanese on Duolingo; looking at my current streak (one full [leap] year), it seems I took up Duolingo precisely on January first.
Except for a short stint with German, all these years I have been using Duolingo to brush up on my Japanese only. Duolingo is good, but is no substitute for proper studying and practicing. I notice its declining returns as I go through sections and units: it encourages mindless pattern-matching and it becomes boring after a while.
This year I have been religious about doing at least a little bit of Duolingo every day, but I have been for months toying with the idea of ditching it, grabbing one of the several good textbooks I have, and studying “the right way” again, ie with pen and paper. Let's see if I manage to do that in 2025…
AntennaPod (podcasts)
This year I listened to a ton of podcasts again: an average of 1h49′ per day. I believe AntennaPod's stats below are independent of playing time, and I listen to almost everything at 1.5×, so the actual average is probably around 1h15′ / day.
No suprises among the top shows, except that I don't remember listening to that much of Jordan Peterson this year (?). Clearly I am still a Sam Harris fan. I am often critical of Triggernometry, but I keep listening to them because they invite great guests. The Free Press continues to be great. Two of my top sources are EA-adjacent (80,000 Hours Podcast and Clearer Thinking), and another one (Making Sense) is very sympathetic to the movement.
It seems I listened to more content than in the last two years.
It's interesting to see how August used to be my weak month (less commute, less gym, fewer chores alone at home), but this year it was June because at the beginning of that month I switched jobs and that kept me extra busy for a while.
Goodreads (books)
This year I intended to read 12 books, and ended up reading 15 (Goodreads is missing one book because it's not in its database).
Althought I'd love to be the kind of person who reads 25 or 50 books a year, getting to fifteen is a little achievement I'm proud of. Even considering that six of those were comics or graphic novels, and that another one was a short story, the other books I read tend to be so long and/or difficult that the balance is still ambitious enough: this year, two volumes by Proust and one by Montaigne, plus a 400-page-long novel.
In fact, I use those other easy reads to rest and to cleanse my literary palate in between “assignments”.
I don't think I ever read as many books in a single year during the last decade or two. Although, truth be told, I don't think I ever read six graphic novels in a single year, either.
