2025

Happy new year! Once again it’s time for me to reflect on how I’ve spent my time in the last year and set some directional goals for how to spend my time in the new year.

Before reflecting on my goals from last year, I decided to pencil in what my goals for this year could be. While it had been a while since I thought about the 2024 edition of this post, there are unsurprisingly a lot of similarities between last year’s goals and this year’s. Below is what I decided on for 2025.

Replace some amount of my coffee drinking with tea

This is a relatively small goal of mine. Years ago I didn’t drink coffee, but over the last couple of years it’s been slowly becoming more and more of a daily habit for me. I’m not super worried about caffeine dependence at the moment, luckily, but I am worried about some of the side-effects I’ve noticed while drinking coffee. Specifically, I’ve noticed I sleep much worse and it seems to make me more tense. And I swear it makes running harder (could it be blood pressure?).

Ideally I’d drink coffee only a couple of days a week—Friday and Saturday—but I’m not explicitly making that the goal here. Generally, I just want more of my morning drink routine to involve tea over coffee.

End the year with fewer things than I started it with

I’ve always strived to be a person who doesn’t own a lot of stuff. Unfortunately, over time, it’s easy for stuff to build up. For me—and I’d imagine for most—it’s harder to part with things than to acquire them and this asymmetry makes it hard to remain a minimal person. Entropy or something.

I’ve set goals like this before and not been successful. I’m not yet sure of the right approach to take here, but I’d like to end 2025 with less stuff than I started the year with. This will be a hard one.

Manually track all exercise

It’s pretty typical for me to set an exercise goal. Often this is duration, distance, or volume based. This year I want to try something different. While I still want to maintain—or even increase—my volume for a variety of activities, that hasn’t been my main challenge in the last year.

My challenge has been spreading myself thin across three different activities: running, rowing, and tennis.

I’d like to maintain a bit more balance across these and I think by forcing myself to manually track these activities I might have a better shot at noticing—and correcting—imbalance issues between them. The idea is to be mindful and intentional with where my time is going. This will be another hard one.

Spend more of my free time reading

Speaking of mindfulness, these last few goals are also related. Per usual, I’d like to spend more of my free time reading and less of my free time on less productive outlets like the internet. When I have a book ready to go this often isn’t a challenge for me, but sometimes I just don’t have a book handy that strikes the mood of that moment. In 2025, I should try to have a few books ready at all time so that I have the best environment possible for this.

Spend less of my free time on the internet

In the last couple of years the internet (or at least the sites I frequent) have really devolved in quality. Especially sites like Reddit. Growth at all costs and LLMs are starting to make the internet feel particularly dead.

Since I don’t gain a lot by browsing the internet these days, I should just avoid it. I should aim to make my relationship with the internet in 2025 really purpose-based and only go on it when I have something I need to do. Otherwise, there’s better uses of my time.

Spend more of my free time sitting

Sometimes the best use of time is just sitting. Like a lot of folks, I have a problem with trying to always be doing something. This isn’t necessary and I’d like to spend a higher proportion of my time in 2025 just being.

One of the themes of the goals above is time (as it always is). Specifically how little of it I have. I aim to be mindful of where I spend my time in 2025. I will focus myself on the things that matter and try to steer away from the things that don’t.

Happy 2025—may it be great!