1) This new year, I didn’t add any new resolutions. No great plans to be achieved in this calendar year, no big goals to be chased.
For me, this year is the year where I will make a few important habits stick (regular exercise, mindfulness in everyday activities, writing / teaching / helping on a daily basis, meeting new interesting people every week). These have not changed since last year, so it is going to be a continuation of the process I started many months ago.
The way to think about goal setting you might find helpful is as follows: The time horizon of revisiting / establishing new goals / habits / systems should be equal to the cycle time in which you can make significant compounding impact.
Let me explain: While the end of a year is a good time to reflect on the year gone by and to think about new perspectives / goals / habits, you should do that only with habits and goals that need the ‘year’ as the cycle time. There might be others that need to be revisited more frequently (e.g. quarterly reflections, business OKRs), or less frequently (e.g. long term health habit).
2) But one thing you might want to do, is to pick a ‘theme‘ for the year. The theme will pervade all your habits and behaviour, and the annual theme will unlock new and exciting parts of your persona without you realising it. For example, my theme for this year is ‘fearlessness’. I will deliberately ask myself the question “how would I do this activity differently if I was fearless?” many times this year.
Other themes could be fun, authenticity, candour, carefulness, responsibility, kindness, etc. Try out a ‘theme’ and let me know how it flavours your thinking throughout the year.
p.s. Feels good to be back to regular writing after my holiday break. Hope you all had a good break too!