Inspired by my friends Nat and Tristan I wanted to map out a few goals that I have for the year of 2026.
More often than not I will start the year off strong by creating pretty specific goals, but I slowly find myself falling off. I start taking less and less time to work on my goals and begin to put things off that I was previously going strong at.
In 2025 I wanted to write more and I had set a goal to write 10 blog posts. I wrote 3 total blog posts in 2025. Not quite reaching my goal. I created a system to track how often I wrote code and what I worked on throughout the year only for it to fizzle out after a few months. I wanted to exercise more; I didn't exercise much more than I did in 2024. I had a goal to read more; I didn't even track what books, articles, and papers I had read. Even though I did a lot of reading, I. Don't. Remember. What. I. Read.
That defeats the point of reading technical literature!
All that being said, 2025 was a year of excellent growth. I did write more, I did read more, I had grown in my career more, I went on a ton of trips and had a lot of fun with a variety of friends, and I had ran my first 10k. It was a good year.
So this year for 2026 I do have goals, but I'm going to lay them out as themes instead of measured goals.
Theme #1: Creativity
Taking inspiration from my friend Nat, one of the most creative people I know. I want to explore things outside of my current interests. I'm just going to try new things to see what sticks and what doesn't.
Two new things I've been trying out so far this year:
I've been playing around a bit with Godot and having a ton of fun with it. Nothing too serious yet; it's just been fun to learn something new. Same goes for learning more about AI fundamentals. I've started reading Build a Simple Deep Learning Library.
So far, I suck at both, but I will get better. That's the fun part!
Theme #2: Metrics
Taking inspiration from my friend Tristan, who in my personal opinion is a master at gathering metrics and tracking things they do, I would like to organize my digital life more. I have notes scattered all over the place both in paper and in digital format.
As I said previously, I read a lot of things, but I don't even track the things I read. I've begun using Obsidian more for everything; I've started the process of populating my digital notebook with all the paper notes I have and cataloging my writing.
Theme #3: Health
Everyone wants to start exercising in the new year. This is very cliché. I do want to exercise more, but this theme is more about scheduling appointments, being out in nature, and keeping on top of my mental and physical health. So kind of a smorgasborg of health related things.
In 2025 I ran my first 10k, and I have signed up for the same race again. I'm hopeful this year I will beat my previous time.
It's pretty embarrassing to admit, but I have not seen a general practitioner in about 10 years :(. I have an appointment to start seeing one scheduled in March.
I would like to also be more on top of cooking at home. I tend to order door dash a lot. I don't currently have anything in motion to begin working on this.
Towards the end of 2025 I was kind of bummed that I didn't really meet many of my goals. It was still a great year, especially when I reframed it with the ideas of growth and themes. This year I plan to do that from the very beginning.
Here's to 2026.