I don’t see why New Year’s Resolutions get all the hate. I love it. I know gyms get crowded and packed, and statistics on people keeping their resolutions aren’t great. But I like making them, how many traditions are there, where the collective consciousness simultaneously decides to improve. It’s a great tradition. So the problem isn’t with the tradition itself, it is generally with people not keeping them.

If you think about it when I recount my New Year’s resolutions, I also haven’t considered them a success. Here are the reasons they have failed.

  • Goal too hard. The goal was too hard to achieve. An example of this goal was to get a six-pack. I wanted a six-pack; it looks cool, and I imagine it feels cool when you are soaping yourself in the shower. But it is not an easy goal to achieve. Especially if you exercise to live and do not live to exercise, it would have been a sustained effort for at least a year if I had done it correctly. If I had done with shortcuts, I would have just rebounded. For me, this was a bad goal, and it only made me feel shitter for not achieving it.

  • No Plan afterwards If I achieve the goal, then what? Do I just resume life like normal? I think I have had these types of goals as well: get this certification, get to this realistic weight, complete this challenge, etc. I don’t count achieving these goals as failures per se, but I don’t think they have impacted my life in any noticeable ways.

Learning from these mistakes, this year, I have decided to focus on the journey and not the destination. I want to build a lifestyle rather than goals; goals are still important, but building a lifestyle makes it easier to follow goals. So, this would mean creating a habit and tracking it.

Habits are generally more complicated as a New Year’s resolution than goals because they are harder to measure. There is no goalpost, no end in sight. That is why creating a tracking mechanism is important. Now, there are plenty of ways to track it. You can use these habit streak apps like Streak, HabbitNow, etc. However, I am a data nerd, so I created an Excel spreadsheet and a Python program to analyse myself. This way, I can customise my habits to fit my preferences. I also created a little point system that represents how I prioritise these habits. The points I see as a personal value system. This is still a work in progress, but it shouldn’t take too long to get it up and running. I want to design it in a way that reflects a dynamic value system.

The broad overview of my resolution looks like this.

Track Everything

I want to track as much as possible. Why lose focus? If I am fatigued, track that I am fatigued. I am gonna use my phone mostly to do this. And enter it into my spreadsheet at night. It’s like a scientist studying something, except I am studying myself. This is the main ingredient of the resolution. It also allows me to check the averages instead of minimums. I don’t think you can have the perfect day every day, but you can have a very good average day. What I mean is if the metrics I want are tracked and averaged out for, let’s say, 1 month, 1 week or 1 year, I should still be meeting them on average.

One of the habits I want to get into is waking up at 6:30 am. I want to get my exercise out of the way at that time. But what if a friend invites me to go out and hangout it ends up being midnight, and I end up sleeping at 1:00. I still want my 7-hour sleep, so I do not want to skip out on that, or maybe I have to get up 6:30 and can’t get that perfect 7 hours, then I can still compromise. But as long as I take the average waking time for the week, and it doesn’t go below, let’s say, 6:30-7:00 am, then I can be happy. I want to be as close to perfect as possible, but I still want to enjoy life, given that it doesn’t hurt my life.

Another system I am on my way to implement is a point and penalty system. It’s basically a set of points that represent what I value as a habit. This system allows me to incentivise good behaviour and penalise bad behaviour. Its like a currency system for one person. This bit is being developed but nearly done and should be done soon.

At the end of the day, data has changed the world. Every business makes decisions based on data, countries use data, and social media uses data against us as well. We have social media using data to promote the worst version of ourselves, promoting the likes of Andrew Tate, sexualising anything and Everything and just anything that will take our attention away from us for precious few seconds. We need to take our data back, we need to use data for the best version of ourselves, and I believe tracking your habits is the way to do it.

Sleep

For me, this has always been the cornerstone habit. It is what transitions from one day to another. It is the lingering shadow of the past. If you sleep late one day, then you can ruin the next day. It can mean spending the entire day as a zombie. I have been someone who needs a lot of sleep. I know people who can function very, very well on less than 7 hours of sleep. This is not me; I need the 7.5-8 hours. I wish I wish, I wish I could live on 6.5 hours; I would have 1 whole hour of life. But every person must do with what is given to him/her.

I want to go to sleep on average at 10:30 am and wake up on average at 6:30 am. I am also gonna try and get 8 hours of sleep. Now, what if one day, I overstep and sleep at 1 am because of life? Well, I am going to focus on the wake-up timing and less so on hours slept. Now, I can’t do this on average, but during the outlier period, I believe doing this will stop the cascading effect of moving the sleep time further up. I can also take a nap after work to make up for it. I also cannot take a nap if I have gotten 8 hours of sleep. Instead of napping, I can meditate restfully (Yoga Nidra).

Summary:

  • Go to sleep on average at 10:30 am.
  • wake up on average at 6:30 am.
  • And get, on average, 7.5 hours of sleep.

Diet

Diet is probably the hardest of my habits. It’s very, very, very difficult to know what a good diet is. I feel like it is very context-dependent. But I am trying to lose weight. So, one thing I know for sure is that I have to be in an energy deficit. I also know the following foods are “good for you”:

  • Fruits
  • Vegetable
  • Eggs
  • Tofu
  • Beans
  • Lean Meat (I do want to be a vegetarian someday for moral reasons)

Food that is heuristically bad for you

  • Fast Food
  • Chips
  • Cheese
  • Chocolate
  • etc… I’ll know it when I see it kinda thing. (I said it was difficult)

So my goal is to eat at most three healthy meals per day and be under around 2000 calories/ 8000 kj per day and about 150g of protein per day. I can skip meals as well if I want to make it under. I am going to try and eat no Uber eats whatsoever, basically no eating out unless the social situation makes it impossible. I also want to reduce alcohol, as little as little alcohol as possible. The aim is not to have more than three standard glasses per week. But it will be included in the point system as a penalty.

Diet one is difficult because it is very hard to define. Maybe I will know once I experiment with what I eat and what makes me feel better. I honestly am impressed when people say this food makes me feel shit or this makes me feel good. I could never make that causal leap; I have very little intuition about these things. Hopefully, tracking this will make a difference.

Summary:

  • Eat what is generally categorised as healthy food.
  • don’t drink more than three standard drinks of alcohol per week,
  • Don’t eat fast food/Uber eats
  • Eat less than 8000 kj and try to get 150 g of protein per day.

Fitness

With regard to fitness, there are three primary modalities and one secondary modality that I want to focus on:

  • Strength: My favourite training method is the one that I like the best but also one that allows me to skimp on intensity. So, this time, I want to make sure I am mindful about the gym. Track rest time, track the number of reps I do actively, etc. I want to do a push, pull, and legs for a macrocycle. A Macrocycle is 4 Mesocycle. One Mesocycle has 6 Microcycles. One Microcycles has six workouts. I have a program I created that can be dynamically adjusted depending on how I am progressing toward my goals. But the important bit is that I get, on average, 200 minutes per week.

  • Cardio: I hated running but always saw it as a skill every person needs. But I feel like my general cardio is pretty shit. I want to give it almost as much attention as strength training. On average, 135 minutes per week.

  • Aesthetics (Sometimes you be vain yo): Yeah this deserves its own category. Usually I am embarassed to say this out loud, cause it is vain, self absorbed metric. But honestly it is also the metric that motivates me the most, I can’t lie. I came from a monkey, sometimes gotta lean into the monkey brain, when you trying your best to go beyond it. Take progress pics and post it in dedicated instagram.

  • Flexibility (minor) (next stage): This is a minor goal but I do want get into the habbit doing stretches and being more mobile in general. But its a habbit that I will bring to focus once I am on top of other stuff. Spend on averge 15 minutes stretching. But no pressure on it yet.

Another big emphasis I want to put is having zero sedentary days. So even on days when I am wrecked and can’t do anything, I want to go for walks and get that 10,000 steps. So, there should be no days where I just stay at home the entire day.

I also want to focus on sports, but I am not certain which one yet, so wont make any goals yet. Bouldering could be it, but I feel like since my elbow injury I will be slow to get into bouldering. But I want to spend more social time engaging in sports/active stuff. So do more hiking, pickle ball, maybe tennis, basketball, etc.

Summary:

  • Strength: On average, 200 minutes per week, meeting whatever volume goals you have per microcycle.
  • Cardio: On average, 135 minutes per week.
  • Aesthetics: Take one progress photo per day and post it on Instagram
  • Flexibility/mobility: Try on average 15 minutes a day
  • Movement: 10,000 steps a day.

Mind

For this one, there are a few topics that are bunched in. This is an important topic but secondary to the ones I have listed above. Since I believe it’s easier for causal forces to flow from body to mind. I’ll explain this concept in a blog sometime later, but below are some of my goals

  • Reading: I want to read on average 10 pages a day. Of any book, and it cannot include audiobooks.
  • Writing: I want to either write on a journal or post something on my blog. I want post something small in my blog on average 2 times a week. Small thought pieces smaller than this. I want to write in a journal everyday.
  • Meditation: I want to meditate an average of 15 minutes a day.
  • Programming( Next Stage): I am a software developer. This category is a generalisation of sharpening my skillset.

Summary:

  • Reading: Avg of 10 pages a day
  • Writing: Avg of 200 words a day. 2 Blog posts a week
  • Meditation: Avg of 15 minutes a day
  • Programming (next stage)

Others

There are other resolutions that I want to track, but I feel like the ones above make the spine my habbits. They sort of dictate how I do everything else. But here are some other resolutions I want to track:

  • Social: I want to spend more time with friends. I want to do atleast one date night per month with my partner. I want to spend on average 8 hours a week with friends. I want to go out on average 2 times a week. I want to call my parents on average 2 times a week.
  • Career: I want to track my focus time at work. How many hours of focus time I have at work. I want to on average of three hours of deep work per day at work. Maybe get some more certifications like the AWS one or data engineering certs.

Conclusion

I hope I have expressed my thoughts clearly. I am excited about this new resolution. I feel like I have created some system that allows me to not only stick to my goals but also enjoy the process. I think posting the pics on Instagram and doing these blog posts puts a level of accountability that I have never had before.