From 2024 to 2025

It's been an interesting year, I set out to run more, read more, and write more. The goal was about creating new habits and prioritizing health. As I now got comfortable with all of the above I find myself wanting to focus on doing them better.

Starting with reading, I'm changing the way I read books. I'm afraid I spent too much time worrying about how much ground I covered than the quality of the ground covered. Reading plenty of books loses meaning if you can't recall much. It becomes a vanity badge, but that's not what I want to get out of books I'm reading. I'm going to slow down, spend more time digesting what I read, and write notes in Obsidian at the end of each chapter. I found that to be a good way to help myself remember more of what I read. Reflecting more and consuming higher quality content.

I want to write less but better. While the idea of writing "Thoughts" was good to get me in the habit, I want to reduce the frequency of them and instead focus on bigger pieces reflecting on topics I am interested in. Rather than writing 3+ thoughts a week, I want to spend more time reviewing and refining focused posts monthly. I have spent a good amount of time getting some writing "out of my system" that I now feel the need to be more deliberate on how and what I write about. I think weekly "Thoughts" will likely stay but in a reduced frequency (closer to what I've been doing lately). I also want to get more external feedback. I believe that is a necessary step to get better at anything. I am blessed with wonderful coworkers who are willing to go through the pain of reading my drafts.

I want to run 100 miles this year. But, more importantly, I want to be able to run 5Ks comfortably at an increasingly faster pace and focus on reducing any ache. While I resumed a good running habit this year, consistency was a challenge which affected progress. From Thanksgiving on I was way more consistent and saw really good improvements. I want to keep that going all throughout the year.

Thoughts

I'm pretty happy about how 2024 went. I kept up wih my reading and writing habits. Looking back though, I'm not entirely satisfied with the quality of it all. I was worried too much about hitting specific numbers (30+ books) than I did about retaining that information. I believe it put unnecessary stress on something I genuinely enjoy. The biggest mistake was feeling constantly "rushed" (by what exactly I don't know), which pushed me to cut corners on anything that wouldn't count towards a metric or would take away time from it (e.g. writing notes down). That will change this year as I plan to retain much more of what I read.