If I had to summarize 2025 in one word it would be this: repetition.
I solidified my health habits, tried to build a business, learned a modern tech stack, and finally cracked the code on consistency.
Here is what I did in 2025.
Productivity
I implemented a new deep work tracker and a fresh time-blocking system. I really like how my custom planner turned out; it took me hours to make and I use it for both time blocking (in order to do more deep work) and to do something called “interstitial journaling,” where the goal is to be aware, as much as I can, of what I’m doing in a single day to keep me from being distracted or scrolling the news.
I jumpstarted my reading habit with the help of many audiobooks and I ended up reading 15 books this year. I also started learning to drive a manual transmission early in the year and got decent at it; now I actually prefer manual to automatic.
I tracked my sleep for the entire year. There’s no denying that getting a good restful sleep each night is a prerequisite for being able to work more. I personally need more than 7 hours of sleep to function.
This year taught me that you can have the best productivity system in the world, but if your baseline physiology (rest and health) isn’t managed, the system will fail.
I logged a total of 389.5 hours of deep work. Which is only an hour or so a day. This is bad. Very bad. Should be much higher. The minimum should’ve been 1400 hours; otherwise, it means that the majority of my time is spent doing dumb stuff. Like watching YouTube for five hours, for example. It’s 110 hours more than 2024 but somehow I know that I haven’t tried my best.
Skills
I finished The Odin Project foundations course sometime in April. I also tried daily driving Arch Linux and learning Vim navigation. I now use Omarchy and I use vim every day. I can’t imagine going back to typing without vim lol.
I applied for an internship at Boeing in June and got rejected. Obviously, since my CV is empty. It made me think for a while on what I actually value in life, and most importantly, how I’m going to get it.
In July, I landed a freelance gig with a client in Japan through Upwork. It was a stable offer to manage a media channel, but I realized the role offered zero technical skill growth. He offered me around 400 dollars a month but I rejected it because at the time I had to deal with reports and stuff from school. I felt like it was slavery since I’d be spending many hours on that project but only getting paid very little (honestly I think the dude is kinda weird; he’s probably like one of those people who think they can outsource everything to someone from a developing country and because his currency is stronger he can get rich without working himself). You could argue that it’ll help me bring some awareness to what a job actually feels like, but I would rather work on something that is more hands-on rather than working on something that doesn’t totally suit my interests, since the project was related to music which is something I’m not particularly interested in.
So I turned down the freelance offer. I wanted to learn sales and web development in the trenches, not just maintain someone else’s workflow or do something related to engineering.
Then I tried a business where I made websites for SMEs. I started warm outreach and offered value-first services to build a portfolio. It worked. By mid-August, I had shipped my first client project.
The tech stack I used at the time: Next.js, TailwindCSS, DaisyUI, MongoDB, Mongoose. I also got comfortable in Typescript and Postgres.
But I didn’t continue it lmaooo. Looking back, probably because I see no immediate way to monetize it. And cashflow is everything in a business, so…
I started writing my undergraduate thesis. I also focused heavily on mental clarity, so I started journaling like one sentence a day using this prompt book I found online.
And then at the end of the year, I revamped this website.
My Korean got much better. I did an entire book on prompt sentences where there are many questions like ” 직접 손으로 다른사람에게 줄 선물을 만들어 본 적이 있나요? 있다면 무엇을 만들어 보았나요?” and we’re supposed to answer as long as possible with the 5W1H framework. I did a lot of that and recorded myself speaking; that totaled more than three hours and it helped me speak more easily (though I can’t say for the actual proficiency since I keep using the same phrases and words). I also had a few multi-hour phone calls and regularly exchanged messages with friends from the Samsung Republic. I also found this insanely good grammar book series called One Stop Volume or something and I’m halfway through the first book and I wish this book existed back when I started outputting lol.
It’s so weird that I got to do this. The world is insanely small and large at the same time. I intend to meet as many people who share my values as I can in my lifetime. I don’t know how I’m going to do that but feels like I got nothing better to do with my time so I’ll probably do that.
Thoughts
The biggest idea I internalized this year is the concept of human finitude. There’s so much I can do at any given time, yet my time is limited. In order to do my best on the things that I actually care about, I must do one thing at a time, or rotate between a few major projects—that’s probably like only three or four. Anything higher than that sounds impossible; especially since I have no leverage like people working for me or money I can spend to automate stuff.
At the start of the year, I believe I had around six or seven major goals. Then I narrowed it down to five. And between those five, the only one I stuck through till the end was exercising regularly. Honestly my achievement is just that and being able to drive stick shift (manual transmission). Literally it lol. Which honestly ain’t that bad. But then again, not enough.
A total of 149 days were spent productively, which are days where I did something and not just 뒹굴거려 as the Koreans would say. Basically days where I either spent at least an hour doing something meaningful that gets me closer to my goals or where I wasn’t at home and doing something social. So that is 40.8% of the year; it’s actually a little bit lower than 2024 at 163 days of the year (44.6%).
One very funny thing I achieved(?) is a massive return on the stock market. The Jakarta Composite (IHSG in Indonesian) had a whopping 22% yoy return last year. Insane. Since I invested every month, I got decent numbers. And all my portfolio is in the stock market. So that was nice. As I’m writing this it has crossed the 9k mark for the first time ever. Nice.
2025 theme is repetition. Why? Cause I don’t stop. And I know now that for everything that I’ll ever do, if I haven’t spent everything I could possibly give at it, I won’t give up. Because that means I haven’t done my best. I haven’t shown what I’m actually capable of, what the limits are, so to speak. And this matters because that is the ultimate judge. There are very few things I can be good at in my short lifetime. And I’m already 22; this means I got a few decades to get good at a very insanely small number of things. So that’s a problem. I know that I’m insanely good at parsing information, foreign languages, geopolitics/world history, computers/coding. I need to ensure that I’m actually that good and/or find more things to be good at before unleashing all of that as what those people in LinkedIn call a “career moat” where those skills are supposed to make me money.
We’ll see how that goes.
THE FUTURE
In last year’s review, I wrote about “changing the patterns”. Did I do it? Yes. I exercise regularly now, I know the importance of being consistent. I know the power of not giving up. The actual day-to-day executions leave much to be desired though. But 1% improvement everyday will get me there so I’m not that worried.
The median prediction for AGI that will automate all human tasks is now around the mid-2030s. Meaning if they’re right I got about 10 years to ensure a good foundation for life. This is very esoteric thinking but it’s true and will affect us all. It will be much bigger than the impact of the industrial revolution. The people at LessWrong and Bay Area people are thinking hard about this problem of AI alignment. I don’t know what to say about that.
On the one hand I like AI since it helps a lot in many tasks, on the other hand I am kinda afraid if all barriers of learning are being driven down then competing will truly be done on the cognitive and hard work level. Meaning it’s not enough to do hard work but also be smart as well. It’s annoying. Why is it that when I was in high school it was the pandemic, now when I’m entering the job market AI is purportedly going to take over? Gimme a break.
And we’re only two weeks into 2026 and look what happened in Venezuela and Iran. Crazy world that we live in.
Anyways, I suppose these kinds of reviews of what I did in the year serve as a reminder of what life used to look like before I’m FORCED to LOCK IN.
As we all should.
What will I be locking in on, for this year? It will be my undergraduate thesis. I intend to nudge it a lil’ closer every week. And I also want to finish the prompt and grammar books for Korean since it’s so fun lol. These days I’m watching 배텐 and 저점매수 and I’m also really considering catching up with the episodes on 워크맨. Really fun stuff.
The little things in life, guys. It all comes down to it. How we live every second of our lives. I can’t even read the news about what happens in my country anymore. It numbs me. I don’t care. Nor do I honestly care what happens in the middle east, or in Minnesota. Who cares. I want my warm meal and YouTube and chill. And I’ll work on my thesis when I have the time. Then I graduate. Then I get a job. Then I die.
Or not? Maybe I could do something about that. THAT is what I’m going to LOCK IN for this year.
By December of 2026, if I’m still alive, I will report my progress. We will examine if I’m able to change even more patterns! What will the future look like???
Well I don’t know. Nor will you. Maybe that’s the point, right? Since it’ll be boring if you know you will succeed (or fail). Some people believe that though. That their fate is predestined. Yet they also believe in free will…so they’re compatibilists? Idk. I don’t care either way lmao.
Anyways, good luck and godspeed for 2026!!
