My hopes for 2021 were as about as grim as I predicted and once again I did not quite manage to achieve my goals. However, in November, I discovered a possible reason why I struggled so much to reach my goals and in December it was confirmed: I have ADHD.

As a result, I'll give myself a bit of a break here, I actually did manage to achieve one of my goals and I've actually made a ton of headway with another. So I'll call it a win.

1) Maintain a sustainable weight loss... failed

I actually did really well with this for a while but I have struggled to sustain it in a way that I'm happy with. I started to feel a ton of mental pressure in the latter 1/2 of the year - in fact it was this that encouraged me to see my ADHD diagnosis - but that caused me to put aside my weight loss goals and I did so in a big way. I have not gained a significant amount of weight in fact I think I am a little lighter than I was when the year started but only by a few lbs.

2) Get my finances in order ... bit of both.

Interestingly, I sort of succeeded here, just not in the way I thought I would. In Feburary I decided I'd have another shot at using YNAB to make myself stick to a budget. I struggled to get my head around it when I first tried it a few years ago but this time it clicked and I've used it religiously ever since.

We've done a ton of work to the house this year and that's cost a fair bit of money, I also had to buy a new car as my old one broke down, so my credit card debt has only gone down by a few thousand pounds, however I'm now confident that I can stick to my budget and even if I don't pay it off that fast, it will still be gone within a year or two.

3) Write more ... failed. Big time.

Writing is something I desperately want to be able to get back into, a friend of mine once told me that if I wanted to be a writer then I'd write and I really took that to heart. However, now I know I have ADHD I'm willing to accept that I'm not to blame for not being able to write as much as I want to. In a few months, I'll be medicated and will hopefully find all of this much easier.

4) Launch a software project... success!

So earlier this year, I wrote a few software applications. All of them were apps to help me with organisation, two of them are Telegram bots, one to help me and my wife keep our shopping list in sync and the other is to help me automatically save my receipts to Dropbox. The other app is a Python app (which I've never written in before) which allows me and my wife to catalogue our large library of books and implement a dewey decimal system using Notion as a data store.

The revelation that I have ADHD has reframed my sense of who I am and is still something I am coming to terms with. I've also not yet started medication which may take a few months before I am on the right meds for me. I am still going to write a goals list for the year but I think I will wait a little while before I write it as right now feels a little premature.