The first week of January every year I take the week off. It’s not a trip anywhere. It’s a week of reflection and planning. The perfect moment to look forward to the next year and set up objectives. The process is quite simple really. I read a letter I’ve written to myself the year before, and write a new one for next year. There’s something special about scribbling your thoughts on paper on the very first day of the year. I limit this to 1 page long.

Last year, my letter to myself had a long list of thoughts, but it included the following ideas and goals I wanted to reach:

Lucky for me, one of the first books I’ve read last year was Atomic Habits. This was a transformative book. The idea that stuck to me the most was that “every action you take is a vote for the person you want to become”. The importance of small actions every day is emphasized in the book. And 2021 was a year of discovering this. I set out to follow 3 habits in order to reach my objectives above:

During the year I discovered a lot about myself on following habits consistently. I noticed early on that I was struggling more with reading than doing exercise or Spanish. Duolingo is very good at turning the process of learning Spanish into a game. It gives you achievements, streaks, rankings, etc. The Apple Watch and the Fitness app too. You get activity achievements, detailed data on the workout. Even the weight scale is connected to the Health ecosystem. I noticed I didn’t have any insight into progress on reading, and perhaps that’s one thing that was demotivating me.

The feedback loop was too long, or even inexistent. I accidentally picked up Goodreads early in 2021. This was a game-changer for me. Just having some data on progress and the reading challenge was enough to get me going. I’ve finished the year with quite a bit of success around those objectives. I’m now sitting at 200 pounds, and I managed to run a half-marathon for the first time. I’ve read 40 books last year and started a habit of notetaking. I’ve also been very consistent with Spanish.

So what’s next for this year?

I recently started watching some of Ali Abdaal’s videos, I really liked his analogy with productivity around the pilot, the plane, and the engineer. It’s a simple thought, it talks about splitting your productivity into 3 categories:

I spent the last week in both the Pilot and the Engineer category. Writing the letter to myself is the pilot making a commitment to my future self about where the plane should land in December 2022. I also refined my habits to make sure I have better odds of landing where I want. The result of my engineering period looks roughly like this:

One of the themes I want to focus on this year is consistency. Last year was a discovery finding that small steps lead up to bigger results. Unfortunately, I sort of gave up roughly 4 months in the year. If I stay consistent throughout the year, I think it’ll really show January 2023. One prompt to remind me to keep going this year:

A perfect example of this is how I’m writing this page at the moment. I’m trying out this thing: Write two shitty paragraphs of ideas every day. The accumulation of this will lead to enough content that I can eventually only keep the good parts. As long as I stick to writing those two paragraphs a day.

So that’s it, hopefully, I get to write a similar essay next year.

Cheers.