If you’re not familiar — on Wednesdays, I write “off topic” posts on my blog; transit and city-related posts come out on Mondays and Fridays, so if you’re only interested in that, see you on Friday!

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The subject of New Year’s resolutions is quite fraught — people are just bad at forming habits that they are forming because “New Year!”, which is why I don’t really do New Year’s resolutions. Instead, I like to set goals that are targets for the year, but don’t necessarily mean than I am making a behavioural 180 on January 1 to meet them.

In 2023, I set and hit a number of goals, and in the process I further refined the type of and way I will set goals in 2024 — I should say I’m not religious about changing these goals if circumstances change; they are mostly meant as a useful tool for keeping me moving in the right direction.

One goal I set in 2023 was to read 24 books — 2 per month; this as it turns out was doable, but there were some issues with it. As I got to the middle of the year, I had read significantly more books than I needed to by that point in time, and that lead to me slacking a bit in the latter half of the year (I still read >1 book on average over the last 6 months to be fair), and that should have been a sign to change my goal to better match my ability to read. Probably more importantly though, I ended up reading a few short books throughout the year (although one of them — a guidebook on Tokyo, and another full of advice from Kevin Kelly were well worth the read) probably in order to inflate my numbers — which feels a bit cheap. At the same time, I feel like the static book goal made reading two of the longer books I read this year (The Prize, From Dawn to Decadence, both push close to 1000 pages) a bit needlessly stressful.

The point to be made here is that having a last year to look at is often a big help when planning goals — it gives you a bit of perspective on where things may get derailed and what’s worth focusing attention on. So what are my goals for 2024? Let’s take a look at the most important ones and why I am focusing on them for 2024. I hope to be able to report back at the end of the year to tell you how things went!

The Goals

Over the last few years, I’ve typically categorized my goals into four main categories, which feels sufficient to organize them in my mind without making the categories hard to forget.

Personal Goals

These are goals which have to do with me but that are not explicitly work or health related — think learning, and broad self improvement.

1. Get rid of stuff and declutter — improve resistance to acquiring things; this one is pretty simple: as humans we often accumulate a lot of stuff, and when living in a city in particular, accumulating things is often expensive and means your ability to move, find things, and enjoy the space you do have is reduced. I think people also often have a tendency to use things to try and make ourselves happy’ reducing the number of things we have — and critically trying to stop the inflow of new things can likely help us face this.
2. Cut down on email; doing YouTube and blogging is fun in general, but the amount of email I get is enormous. Truth is, I spend too much time responding to almost every email I get, and while this might seem to be a good thing to do in a vacuum, it takes a ton of time. And if people are sending email to ask me for something they could just Google then I am not really helping them either. I think email is probably best managed by just responding to some top X% highest priority messages and waiting to see if anything comes from the rest.
3. Take weekends off; for the past 5 years or so I have worked on weekends, this is bad and has probably discouraged me from enjoying things like hiking and camping among other things more. I’ve also not been resting enough in general. Taking weekends off, and continuing to work like crazy during the regular work week seems like a good balance. Hopefully this can be combined with things like checking email less for some additional mental clarity. (Not having videos early in the week in 2024 will help a lot with this too, since I used to spend weekends making the first video on the next week.)
4. Eliminate casual social media use; this one is related to (2), but I spend too much time casually on social media. To be clear, this isn’t a call for people to stop watching YouTube (I could never encourage that!) or messaging their friends on Facebook (does anyone still use Facebook?), but an aim to not have my default bodily reaction to a moment of pause or boredom be reaching for my phone to check Twitter. It would be much better to make my default reaction to boredom opening up a book! I think social media is probably best treated like email — provide limited time to partake in it and let the most important stuff shake out that way.
5. Read 12 substantial books; this goal is directly coming out of last years and the changes I want to make from that — my hope is to try and read a bunch of Pulitzer prize-winning books, ideally at about one per month. If I do more than that, great!
6. Get back into programming and proof-writing; despite doing my Bachelors in Computer Science where I wrote a lot of code and did a lot of proofs (that is mathematical proofs), I really have not done a lot in recent years and I’d like to change that. I sometimes think about getting back into the technology industry, but I also just generally appreciate the process of writing code and proofs so getting back into both seems wise. I am not sure exactly how I will do the proofs part (I will probably just casually do Leetcode for programming), so if anyone reading this knows of a great series of proofs one can do that build on each other let me know!
7. Spend more time in nature; growing up in Vancouver, going hiking, camping, kayaking, and skiing were all common. I think that’s because British Columbia really does have fantastic places to do all these things, but also because people who like doing these things are concentrated in Vancouver. It’s incredible to me how much less “going outdoors” happens in other cities. That being said, the city I live in now is surrounded by lovely nature, and I think getting out into it would be good for my health, both mental and physical, as well as my appreciation for the place.

Health Goals

These are goals that have to do with my health, which like most people is OK, but could be a lot better. I really think people underrate the degree to which being healthy makes you feel good, and that mental and physical health have a lot of synergies.

1. Lose weight; I’ve actually lost a lot of weight over the last two years, and I’d like to get back to approximately my weight when I graduated high school in 2024. Losing weight is a real challenge, but it’s one of those things that can be a very fulfilling journey. Personally, while I find losing weight requires a lot of effort, I generally can maintain a weight fairly easily — so once the hard work of moving the needle is done, keeping it there is less of an issue. Losing weight ultimately leads to a huge uplift in how I feel, the amount exercising sucks, and it probably also means my body has less pressure on it — which is good in the long term.
2. Keep my good sleep schedule; I actually talked about this in a recent post, but getting into a more regular sleep schedule has been awesome, and maintaining that will do a lot for my health holistically.
3. Track what I’m eating; I enjoy snacking, which is counterproductive to (1) and also just generally hard to track, as well as a real time waster. What I’ve found is that forcing myself to write down everything I ate at the end of each day forces me to snack less, almost entirely because my brain wants to simplify the remembering what I ate at the end of the day process — it’s also just a reminder that I need to lay off the chocolate.
4. Improve my flexibility; I have never been particularly flexible, and this has always bothered me — but also probably turned me off of doing something about it. In 2024, I’d love to make significant progress on this.

Job Goals

These are goals which have to do with my work — which at the moment is primarily YouTube and blogging here! A lot of the goals for this year regard rebranding the channel (I like to do a little visual refresh every few years), some of the graphics for which you can already see on this blog. I also want to actually maintain my proposed reduced video production on YouTube (4 videos per month or so in 2024) and keep posting 2 – 3 posts per week here on the blog. Furthermore, I want to make sure those videos are drafted up a week early so that Patrons can get early access, but also help give feedback and make the videos better. Beyond that, most of my job goals are income-related which is basically the product of the things that I make and how big of an impact they have on people — which flows through into YouTube ad revenue and Patreon support.

On the whole, my job goals are not super complex this year because I am trying to refocus my life away from work so I can focus more on my health, relationships, and self-improvement.

Financial Goals

These are goals that have to do with my finances, which are something that stress me out — probably not surprising seeing how rents are in many big Canadian cities these days, suffice to say my rent has more than double in the last couple of years.

1. Pay off debt; it’s as simple as it sounds — debt is not good to hold especially when interest rates are high, it’s also just kind of not something I like! Best to never get into debt in the first place if it can be avoided…
2. Trim costs; trying to have more free money every month to pay down debt and prepare for economic uncertainty means trying to trim costs down. I actually am not a big spender at the moment, I don’t go out drinking (coffee or alcohol — the former probably doesn’t get enough attention) or eating out much — so savings mostly come from things like optimizing the spending I am already doing. Migrating my previous Substack blog and my personal website to this website will save me some money for example. Another thing I have been doing is trying to keep better track of grocery prices so I can better manage inflation over there (I enjoy spreadsheets), and I am also trying to reduce my transportation costs by walking and cycling instead of taking public transport when possible. The obvious thing to say about all of this is that it would probably be a lot easier to make more money than to try and trim fat from what is already a lean budget — but as I mentioned in the job goals, I want to try and work a more healthy amount this year. People also generally don’t appreciate that saving has an outsized impact, since unlike growing income, money you already have has already been taxed!
3. Buy good things; this is something that I am rather passionate about — and for me it mostly pertains to clothing, which is one of those things we have which tend to break down over time. I think when most people are young and growing we buy things mostly based on what looks nice or is in fashion, but for me I am at the point in my life where if something I has does not break I can keep using it indefinitely (all those university sweaters you might see in my videos are a good example of something that has been shockingly durable). The truth is, if you only replace most things when they fail, you can end up spending a lot less money (obviously), and there is a certain satisfaction in trying to find things that are just well-constructed. This wasn’t something that bothered me too much until a pair of Converse I bought in university has the sole break after maybe two months of wear and I realized I really shouldn’t purchase things from companies that make such poor quality products (and which do not come cheap!). As it turns out, it’s not entirely intuitive what things will break — this often is not correlated with cost, and so trying to learn how to identify good things that save me money and produce less waste is an ever continuing journey.
4. Improve cooking skills; I wasn’t sure whether to put this into Finances or Health, but since I think it has a bigger impact on the former I’ve put it here. Eating out is expensive, and when you know exactly what goes into your food I think you’re more likely to lean into making better decisions. Making your own food also helps with portion control, which can be a real challenge.

While these are my main goals, there are broader goals that I would be happy to fulfil, but that I can’t guarantee I will manage this year — they’re helpful mostly for general direction if I get through the other goals easily. One way I like to come up with these broad goals is by looking through my list of “achievements” from the previous year and pulling from that. For 2024, that means trying to travel more (without spending too much), trying to get onto more interesting & technical transit tours, and also just trying to improve myself instead of just diving headfirst into work at every chance I get.