I did a little review, and unless I’ve missed a post somewhere, I’ve only once written a public “New Year’s Resolutions”. I considered titling this post my “2026 Resolutions”, but that doesn’t exactly capture what I’m going for. Rather, these are intended to be goals and aspirations that I can measure myself against at the end of the year, and if I chose to ignore, change, or rewrite them throughout the year, then so be it. 🙂

Personal Goals

• Read 18 or more books. As noted in a post at the end of 2025, last year my reading took a hit. I feel better about myself when I read more, and I enjoy learning new things by reading (history, personal development, etc), and enjoying the imagination of the authors (in fiction specifically).
• Reduce morning screen time and rebuild devotion/reading habit. There’s not much to say about this; my reading habit took a hit because I started scrolling the web on my iPad in the morning. My goal is to get back to reading books during my morning coffee.
• Revive my GTD habit/practice. I’ve written about my interest in the Getting Things Done methodology before, and while I’m not convinced that every single piece can be applied to my life well, I definitely feel more on top of things when I am doing brief morning reviews (daily) and a weekly review on the weekends. Maybe I should track this in my weekly review post? 🤔
• Visit family for at least 4-6 weeks. During 2025 I spent close to 6 weeks (between vacation and remote work) visiting family, if I did my calculations right. As long as they’ll have me, I’d like to aim for the same in 2026. Something I realize as I get older is that I didn’t prioritize family as much as I should have when I was younger, and I don’t want to continue making that mistake.
• Contact distant relatives for genealogy research. I mentioned in my year-in-review that I have received family histories from relatives; I want to be intentional and begin building out a list of family members that I keep in contact with, on both sides of my family.
• Double the number of old family photos digitized. I currently have 450 family photos that have been scanned, edited, dated, and cataloged in my photo library. While I have many more digitized and waiting for me to edit them, I want to increase the total number that have been through the full process to 1000 this year (i.e., roughly doubling).
• Take more photos with my GH5 and lens collection. I also mentioned in my year-in-review post that I was getting back into photography with my GH5, instead of only relying on my phone camera. I want to expand that usage this year, and perhaps do some sharing on my blog?

Health/Fitness

• Rebuild daily workout habit. Last year my daily workouts took a hit, mostly because I didn’t prioritize them. I still was active during the day, but I didn’t spend 30 minutes each morning in either cardio or weight-based workouts, and I think I feel better when that habit exists.
• Reduce snacking outside of meals. This hasn’t been a huge issue in 2025, but I think there is a direct link between lack of weight loss and evening snacking habits. So here’s another area I can improve in!

Work

Obviously, I’m not going to post my professional S.M.A.R.T goals here for the world to see, as they are confidential, but I can at least share a few work-related areas I want to improve.

• Increase the timeliness of replies, especially via email. I’m normally good at replying to Slack messages quickly, but sometimes email falls by the wayside. I think this can tie in well to my refocusing on my GTD habits, as they tend to go hand in hand.
• Improve project-management habits. I don’t exactly know how to describe this, but keeping accurate notes on the state of projects and revisiting them when needed has always been a struggle. Maybe this could tie into my reading and GTD habits, as both an area of study and something to revisit daily/weekly?

Blog/Website

• Post at least weekly (Weekly Reviews). I like the idea of weekly reviews as a way for me to look back at what has occurred this year, and as a way to share interesting things I’ve read, found, etc. And perhaps this year I can expand them to also help track habits? (I’m still pondering this.)
• Write more interesting posts. I think sometimes my posts, especially weekly reviews, became too formulaic. I want to keep things interesting, both for my readers (hi! 👋) and as a way to improve my writing style. I’ll probably keep using LLMs for proofreading, but I doubt I’ll use them at all for drafts, as I experimented with briefly last year. I ended up rewriting them all anyhow, as I don’t like how… fake? LLM-generated posts sound.
• Tweak my website design. This is at best a maybe. Do I actually have anything I want to tweak right now on my website? Not really, other than perhaps a little formatting and choosing different fonts. I’d say I’m 90% happy right now, but occasionally the theme I’m using doesn’t match what I’d personally do. I did fork the theme a year ago, so making personal modifications wouldn’t be that hard.

Home/Tech

• Replace my aging R710 home server. While my old Dell server has been holding up well overall, I’m reaching the storage limits of expandability, and it definitely feels slow at times. For what I use it for (primarily music/audiobook libraries, photo backup, and storage) it works alright, but in the coming year I’d like to migrate to something a bit newer and more capable.
• Find a new project to self-host. Okay, yes, this is vague. Really vague. But I want to keep my eye on cool open-source projects, and if there’s one that either fills a current hole (maybe that I didn’t know I had), or else replaces something I pay for today, it would be fun to move to a self-hosted solution.
• Stop switching productivity tools. This is specifically aimed at the amount of time I have wasted over the years hopping between Todoist and other tools. Look, is Todoist perfect? No. But I think most of my issues are normally self-induced due to lack of good habits (looking at you, weekly reviews), and not something wrong with the tool itself. I need to get over “grass-is-greener” or “shiny-new-tool” syndrome.
• Become more intentional in maintaining my photo library. I still don’t have a good way to describe this, but album creation, tagging, etc (and maybe pruning?) is something I want to get better at. Another idea is to potentially share pictures with family in a printed photo book… I’ve heard the guys on the ATP podcast discuss it a few times, and it could make for a fun gift!
• Create one personal project (coding or building/assembly). This is still pretty ambiguous too. However… Most of what I create is for work at this point, and I’d like a personal passion project to work on. I don’t have a great idea for what it should be, or what it should entail, but it seems like something that would be worth focusing on? 🤷‍♂️

Conclusion

Okay, I probably don’t need a header for this! 😂 Anyhow. That’s my goals and aspirations for 2026! In a year, I’ll get to look back and score myself on how everything went! (And maybe, just maybe, I’ll add in some weekly or monthly updates…)