2023 Goals
2022 was pretty bad so the only way to go is (hopefully) up for 2023. And since it’s the first post of 2023 that means it’s time to look forward and talk about some of my goals for this coming year. And if you missed my look back at 2022 check out that post here to see how last year stacked up.
Let’s start with travel. The last couple of years have been very bad for travel. China’s incredibly strict zero COVID rules meant that international travel was all but off the table. I managed to sneak a couple of domestic trips in in 2021 but Omicron meant China’s rules got even tougher in 2022 and it was the worst year for travel for me probably since I started traveling. It didn’t look to be getting any better but then around the beginning of December China scrapped most of their COVID rules all at once. Then the required quarantine when entering China was dropped at the beginning of January. That could make travel easier in 2023 than it has been years. The downside of my new job though is that I no longer have the long vacations that let me go on so many trips. That being said I am still hoping that I can get at least one trip in this year. It’ll be my first in years.
What about posting? 2022 wasn’t bad for posting (although looking back I think I forgot to write about that in last weeks post). I’d like to keep that going in 2023. I managed to mostly keep up with Instagram and TikTok and even toyed with daily posts on TikTok. I managed to start doing mostly weekly blog posts as well which I’d like to keep up. Some of those posts were part of the 100 Movie Project that I’ll keep working on as well. YouTube wasn’t so great unfortunately. I struggled quite a bit, especially in the second half of the year after I started my new job, with posting new videos frequently so I’d like to be a little more consistent with that. I think part of that problem was the increased frequency of my posts on TikTok combined with spending a lot of time interacting on Instagram. The amount of time those two things required really cut into YouTube video making, which usually takes longer than the work I do for other sites. I’m not sure how I’ll remedy that but I would like to increase my posting frequency on YouTube in 2023.
Last up we have short films. This was one area where I struggled a lot in 2022. The year started out pretty strong. I filmed a fight we had been working on for a couple months during the Chinese New Year vacation at the beginning of the year then started working a bigger short film another friend was working on that we filmed in May. I also filmed a fun video with Ran in April. But that was pretty much it. I ran into two problems. The first was that I didn’t take advantage of the free time I had between jobs at the beginning of the year. I was mostly free from January until June because of Chinese New Year vacation, COVID restrictions, and then waiting for my new job to start. I should have been able to get at least one more short film filmed during that time. And SJ and I were working on one. But I didn’t get it filmed. The second was that my new job affords me far less time for practicing and filming than my old job. So once I squandered the free time I had at the beginning of the year I didn’t have much time at all. Like with YouTube this is something I’d like to fix in 2023 but am unsure how to.
To be completely honest I’m not too positive going into 2023. While COVID restrictions will hopefully be far less of a barrier to doing things in 2023 than the last couple of years I’ve struggled over the past 6 months to balance all the things I want, and need, to do with the realities of my new job.
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