2025 Review and 2026 Planning
2025 was a good year -- I feel like I spent my time in 2025 very well. Though the work was busy and I traveled a lot, setting OKRs for 2025 helped me stay on track and accomplish a lot of the things I wanted to do.
To review this year, I revisited OKR - 2024 Review and 2025 Planning from last year and also went over kepano's 40-questions with my friends.
What went well in a nutshell:
- I took "learning" (the third objective from 2025 OKR) very seriously and enrolled in MSc in Applied Physics in JHU.
- I was able to read >1 a month.
- I ran a lot and fell in love with it!
- I travelled to 12 new cities across 9 countries.
Some goals didn't go too well:
- I completely bombed keeping a good record of my life. My 5-line journal has been left untouched since April.
- Exploring new ML areas outside of work has been challenging.
Review of 2025 KRs
| Status | Color Code |
|---|---|
| Sent it | 🟢 |
| Satisfactory | 🟡 |
| Could have been better | 🟠 |
| Absolute Failure | 🔴 |
🟢 Read three classics
- I finally finished GEB after 9 years.
- I read A tale of two cities the first thing this year.
- I didn't read 삼국지 but I (almost) finished Introduction to Quantum Mechanics. I count that as classic.
Aside from the KR around classics, I read ~20 books over this year. I'm quite happy with this, especially when I started taking physics courses.
Some of my favorites this year (with some recency bias..):
- Never Let Me Go
- All of Claire Keegan's books: Small things like these, Foster, The Forester's Child.
- Solaris
🟠 Log a hundred different "streams of consciousness"
The act of logging stream of consciousness is not done at all. But given that the purpose of this KR was on building a system where I can log the spontaneous thoughts easier and optionally publish it to my personal space, I invested quite a lot of time and effort investing in the system.
Earlier this year I migrated from Notion to Obsidian, mainly because I started doing all my assignments in Obsidian. (This post itself is written using Obsidian). I invested in:
- Building database of reading list (books and papers mainly)
- Building a todo list system that gathers items across my vault
- Building homepage to jot down the spontaneous thoughts.
- Building website with Obsidian digital garden
- Migrating & writing course notes & assignments in Obsidian
- Syncing this vault with my phone as well
- (I also spent too much time browsing and customising the themes..)
This should serve a lot of my needs of gathering my thoughts. I ended up using the functionalities that require "proper setup" (ie open the laptop, take > 1 min to update the note) but not the ones that are supposed to be quick and effortless.
I will need to continue thinking and building how I can do this. The next step is now on adoption / making a habit of logging things instead of building the system.
🟡 (Road) run 10k in 55 mins & trail run with less than 7 min/km pace.
The road running went really well -- I trained for sub 2 half marathon in second half of the year and with it I was able to achieve my PBs in 5k, 10k, and of course half marathon quite effortlessly. I was able to achieve:
- 25:15 5k -- This was Finsbury parkrun so relatively hilly. Maybe I should have gone for a flat parkrun for sub 25 5k.
- 53:58 10k -- This was just an easy training run along the canal where I felt like I gave 70%. I wonder how much faster I could have run if I went for 100%.
- 1:58:30 half -- Yay my training paid off! 😀 After this Battersea half marathon in November I've been just doing chill runs.
On the other hand, my trail run goal was too ambitious and I didn't get to do as many trail runs as I would have hoped.
🟢 Take at least one graduate-level physics or math course.
Tada, this is probably the biggest change in 2025.
Forcing myself to solve some physics problems, that I sometimes don't understand what they are asking, at 6:30AM before work, was admittedly the most painful part of this year.
I took three courses:
-
615.641 Mathematical Methods for Physics and Engineering
- I was hoping that I could skip this course as I studied math some years ago, but I realized it was too many years ago. I'm glad I took this course as the first.
- I learned that I missed some important math courses in my undergrad that serves as a foundation not only to physics but also to ML.
-
615.653 Classical Mechanics
- I didn't realize how important this course was until I took quantum mechanics! It seems obvious now, but since Quantum Mechanics was built by both extending on and pushing back against classical physics, one really can't master the quantum world without a solid foundation in the classical one.
-
615.654 Quantum Mechanics
I braced myself knowing that this course would be very hard. And throughout this course I realised two things:- There are two types of person who say "I don't understand quantum mechanics" -- someone who understood enough to say they don't understand, and someone who simply just doesn't understand what's going on.
- I was the latter pretty much the whole time I was taking the course. 🥲
What was wrong? I lacked the bridge from the mathematical details of how to solve the problem that leads to "so what"s of the physical concepts. I was able to solve the assignment problems but that didn't give me confidence that I learned QM as much as I wanted to.
I tried solving this issue by reading Introduction to Quantum Mechanics by Griffiths and 처음으로 만나는 양자의 세계 by 채수미. Both were excellent resources that took me through the "so what"s of quantum mechanics.
I think I will need to revisit the course these books and review some of the textbook problems to remind myself what QM is about.
🟠 3 ML side projects
eh.. I always felt a bit torn between 'learning by doing' at work and making time for my own side-learning. Usually, the work stuff just ends up taking over.. I prioritized the first often at the expense of giving up on this goal but I think it was the right decision. I didn't completely give up on this goal though -- I set up jax-metal locally with my M2 Macbook Air so that I can train small models with it.
What else was on my mind this year?
- I really struggled to keep myself away from Youtube Shorts..
- I deleted Youtube App from my phone.
I ended up watching from the web. - I put time limit on Chrome App.
I ended up increasing the time limit. - I disabled History from Youtube so that I search for exactly what I want to watch, instead of starting the doom scrolling form whatever.
I re-enabled it.
- I deleted Youtube App from my phone.
2026 Action Items
Over the past two years of setting OKRs, I’ve managed to build several good habits. Running and reading, in particular, have really stuck, and since I’m currently taking physics courses, I've stabilised the way of learning new things. This year, I want to move into a "solidifying" phase for these habits. While maintaining my current routine—running three times a week, reading one book a month, and keeping up with my physics courses—I want to add a few things to complement them.
(Also I gave up on fitting them into OKR format of 2025 OKR -- what was I thinking when I put reading and logging under "Immerse"? cringe)
20-Minute Meals
Master 5 go-to recipes that take 20 minutes or less.
I’m so lucky to have a partner who is a great cook. (I'm still alive thanks to him.) However, I can’t rely on my husband forever! He'd cook something high-effort over the weekend, but we can't do that during the week days, and we can’t keep relying on Deliveroo. I need to explore a few low-effort recipes and make cooking dinner a habit.
Zero Inbox
Read all unread messages every night before going to bed.
As my friends know all too well, I am terrible at replying. At this point, I’m worried it might come across as rude or offensive. So, this year, I’m setting a SLO for checking my phone and answering the messages.
More reading
Read one paper per week.
Reading books is great, but it’s been a while since I’ve properly engaged with papers. They offer a different kind of fulfillment than books do, so I want to keep up with them and build a skill of reading them effectively.
Side project
Spend at least 30 minutes every day working on side projects or learning, aside from the coursework.
The point is to just do something! Whether it’s noodling around with Obsidian plugins or training a new model, I want to get into the habit of working on something outside of my workstreams.
Logging
Write the journal for less than 10 mins and keep a log of all the books, movies, and papers with brief reviews or my personal thoughts.
I have hard time externalising my fleeting thought mainly for two reasons. I forget them and I feel awkward. As mentioned above in 2025 review section, it's time for me to just do it and log these thoughts.
See you next year 🫡