A different year ahead.

I know it’s already 16 days into January but it still felt right that my first entry be a look at the year to come. Seeing as we’ve just started the new year.

This isn’t some new year, new me message or a list of New Year resolutions that inevitably fail (January gym memberships), but instead a little reflection on things that happened last year that I would like to continue into this year as well new things to come.

---

Reading

Who would’ve thought it, I certainly didn’t.

It shames me to say this but I haven’t been a big reader, well a reader at all really. I’ve dabbled in some books and comics in the past decade but these generally ended up not being finished and probably in all honestly I most likely purchased them due to the cover being aesthetically pleasing.

I think truly the last time I read a book in full before recent times was back when I was a young kid and the Harry Potter series where coming out. So this is probably between 1997-2000. I never read the whole series in the end.

So coming back to present day and in November, 2023 whilst on a short holiday in Poland visiting family I had some unexplained urge to buy a book (The Chaos Machine - Max Fisher) on my iPad mini. I read during the month of November last year and that kicked it all really, once I finished it was straight down to the bookshop to purchase my next read and i’ve been reading everyday since that trip to Poland.

This year I want to carry on my new thirst for reading and have set myself a target of 18 books throughout the year. This feels achievable as so far i’ve been averaging about 2 books a month.

---

Productivity

Productivity can hit me in random burst, but for the most part I’m great at moving something that needs to be done to the next day, and the next, and the next.

Recently i’ve download a simple to-do list app on my phone called Things. It’s basic and obvious but by setting out bulleted things to get done can really help completing them when they’re due rather than the constant delaying. I have the app set as a nice big widget on my phones home screen where it’s easy to glance at what I have coming up as well as also being able to quickly add more things to do when I think of them.

Along side a simple to-do list i’ve been trying to make sure I use my phones calendar. It’s just the default Apple calendar. It’s nothing new but i’ve started to time block set events into my calendar, for example I want to read every morning when I wake up, so I add a block of time that repeats every day at a set time dedicated to reading.

Of course I don’t need to add this to my calendar I could simply just do the activity blocked out. However by actually setting time aside seems to help me achieve doing this events as well as seeing spaces in your day, weeks or months where you have free time to do other things.

---

Home renovations

My partner

Adrianna

and I have been renovating our house for the past couple of years. We’ve taken the challenge ourselves with the help of my dad. The process has been slow and tiring at times but really rewarding when parts are completed and we can stand back and admire the hard work we’ve put in.

This year we tackle the kitchen, which is no small feat. Along side completing the kitchen renovation, we want to wrap up the final tasks to the rest of the downstairs to at least have one half of the house complete and not feel like a constant construction site.