I love the way a number, chart or image can tell you something surprising or insightful about yourself. To get these data self-insights, I have been storing more and more kinds of data over the years about my activities and making different charts on them. This year I have made a dashboard on Books Read, Carbon Emissions, Learning, Relationships, Give Back, Sports and Time Allocation.

In this post, I go over each of these areas briefly taking some insights and describing how I did it, in case you also want to try it.

The Global 2023 Dashboard

This is the image with the relevant areas. I made some general insights here and then go in more detail in each section below. This was the first time I did such a comprehensive dashboard and I really liked the result! To zoom and navigate details click on the image.

Overall, it looks like I made a priority on many self-directed dimensions, like reading, learning, sports, sabbatical and my individual carbon emissions reduction. Looking back I think this was risky. I could have been too focused on myself and more lonely. Thankfully, each of these priorities has somehow connected me to others like talking about the books I read, getting feedback from this blog, joining sports groups, and exploring on the sabbatical with friends or experts.

On the other side, I think some of my relationships, especially some of the closest ones, needed more attention and investment toward the other person’s needs and not so much on my self-originated topics. I have helped and supported others around me, many of them in close relationships, but I see now that it doesn’t replace a deeper investment.

I also have more private data and charts on Personal Finance, Health and Personal Goals that I have decided not to share publically here. I am also looking for or using new solutions to track and visualize, for example, Food Consumption for Health and Sustainability and Screen Time in mobile and computer. If you want to suggest other nice stuff to track, let me know!

Books Read

This 2023 I must have read more than any other year. My target was twenty books and I ended up reading thirty-two. Is true that five of them were comics but still I created a strong routine of reading around four times per week.

The main reason for this increase was the explorations and deep dives started during my Sabbatical on Human Condition, Sustainability and Complex Systems which involved sixteen books. This method of multiple books in the same year on the same topic allowed me to pick what I appreciate from each opinion and create my own framework around that topic. It was sometimes confusing to remember where did I got a particular idea from but it helped to know the key authors and timeline of concepts. I think I will try it again if new topics appear.

My key top three recommendations from my 2023 readings are:

• A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence
  This was my favorite book of 2023. It is from Jeff Hawkins, an entrepreneur and engineer I didn’t know of. The book is from 2021 and it is all quite new so it felt like being back in basic school learning about the human body or nature’s basic functions, really transformational. Not that it is a writing masterpiece but it changed the way I see myself and understand how intelligence is created. It is about how the brain has these small units, present in many other smaller animals. These units were optimized by nature so that simple organisms could navigate and interact with things around them. The magic is that, the same units when connected in thousands like in the human brain, support a high level of intelligence able to learn languages and high-level concepts. To dig deeper and understand why this looks so powerful see the post I did about this book and connected ideas.

• Less is more and Post Growth
  These two recent books form together an excellent easy-reading intro to the rethinking of our economic system and its possible improvements. I found them inspirational and with the positive outlook that sometimes is missing from the Sustainability topics presenting a doomed future. The two authors are currently key representatives of new social-economical thinking and movements, so it’s also a way to understand what is going on. I did a post back in 2023 on Less is More, in case you want to read more.

• O Livro do Deslembramento
  A series of small stories, some incredible, about growing up in the 80s, family and memory. Written by Ondjaki in 2020 in an amazing style of Portuguese of Angola, full of orally spoken expression, sometimes to the point of being incomprehensibly funny. Apart from being really emotional, I loved the fact that was given to me by an uncle and aunt and that talked so much about the richness of being inside a big family.

Carbon Emissions

Since 2021 when I joined some Carbon Emission Experts on a one-month international pilot on tracking personal emissions, I have been making my own annual budget and balance of carbon emissions. The basic idea is that to have a +1.5ºC maximum heating of the planet there is a maximum each of us 8 billion inhabitants can emit per year which was calculated to be 3.4 tons per capita. If we remove the emissions done by publically available services like health, education, roads, infrastructure, estimated at 0.9 tons per capita, we are left with 2.5 tons of CO2 to do our personal lives.

You can see in the notes below how I organized and measured my budget but in 2023, after severely reduction flying for work and vacations, eating less meat and moving less by car I was able to reduce my personal emissions from 6.1 before covid years to 3.3 tons per year. I am still 53% above the 2.5 limit but did a quite strong change with the support and shared decision of my family and employee.

In order to get under the limit and even be able to do one flight every two years, I would need to change my household heating from gas to electricity, adopt a more vegetarian and carefully selected diet and sell or change our second car for and full electric. These are all quite possible and not so impactful in terms of lifestyle and only possible if you take into account that most of the energy in Portugal is from renewables (<65%). The looming problem is that is not under the CO2 limits to have two cars, a spacious heated house for all 8 billion people… but at least I feel I am doing a needed journey and influencing others around me.

Relationships

This section was new this year. I wanted to list all my relationships to understand if I was spending time and investing my energy in the key persons and who I could have missed. I also had an app to log all my phone calls which allowed me to understand to whom I have been speaking, at the same time if I was too much on the phone and not so much in face-to-face interactions.

One conclusion was that I spent a big part of my social time with core family and key work colleagues and less with friends and non-core family. Nevertheless, I still felt that I could have invested more in some relationships in the core family and in some key people, meaning that sometimes spending time together in a meal or weekend is not investing in knowing that person better, making yourself available and allowing the relationship to grow. Clues for 2024.

On the Phone Calls topic I discovered, to my surprise, that I was having half of my total calls and duration with the same three persons and consistently over the months. The other half was spread over just 17 people and little time was spread over the other 100 contacts. It looks like I should transfer call time to more diverse relationships, like those you think: one day I should call him and you keep letting time pass.

Overall I spent 4 hours per week on average on phone calls, which I think is reasonable and would not focus on actively changing.

Sports, Time Allocation and Phases

This was the most visual part of the Dashboard, plotting data over phases, months and weeks so that relationships between the different dimensions could appear. It was interesting to see that actually, the sports routine grew stronger after the Sabbatical and that the work-related week load was much more stable around the 35 hours than I expected based on my weekly semi-chaotic agenda setting. The most variable part, not surprisingly but confirmed by data, was the support to kids that varied from four to forty hours per week.

On the Sports side, this was my most active year of the last ten and it felt good, so it is part of what I want to keep tracking.

Give Back

Making this little visual helped me understand and value this dimension as diverse and rich. Some of the things are new, like engagement with the local community on sustainability but the majority are things I have done now for some years and so are easier to keep up with. I don’t think there is much to track better and room to put many more things in but I will try as this feels really good in retrospective.

In this case, I also don’t have any tools or methods. I just navigated my calendar or weekly tasks to remember some key Give Back actions.

Learning

This topic was much lighter than any other. It just felt right to list the areas and skills I learned this year. To be more effective I would need to have a more comprehensive list of things I learned over the years, allowing to also see what I could have been forgetting.

In this case, I don’t have any tools or methods.