Issue #21

At the end of 2024, I wrote a blog on  how I’m going to achieve my goals in 2025.

Part of which meant scheduling my week.

Every Sunday I sat down to review the week just past:

• Highlighting what went well
• And things that didn’t

So I could figure out where I could improve the following week to achieve my goals.

A couple of things I made sure not to do:

• Not completely overhauling my day-to-day
• Not try and form too many new habits

I also made sure not to worry about following my schedule down to a T, e.g. walking later than I planned was fine as long as I got my walk in.

With that here are the key areas I wanted to improve on:

• Work on side projects daily
• Eat healthy food the majority of the time
• 7k steps/day or 49k steps per week
• Weight training 3x week

So how did these go?

Side projects: I scheduled an hour each morning to work on side projects. But I struggled getting out of bed when it was dark and cold – combined with the fact I didn’t always have a plan of what to work on.

Eating healthily: I struggled most with snacking, so I prepared healthier options – like these protein bars .

Walking daily: some days I didn’t reach the 7k step goal, so I relaxed it to 49k steps a week, it just meant I wouldn’t fail the entire week on Monday if I only managed 6.5k steps

Weight training: this was the hardest having moved all my gym equipment out of my garage in preparation to move house.

All in all, it was a great experiment.

I got knocked off at the end month because my whole family came down with an illness.

But I’ll be trying this experiment again in February and see how it goes.

This month I’ve been listening to  Slow Productivity by Cal Newport.

In it, he puts forward some core principles – one being obsess over quality.

Which I kind of love – I’ve been thinking about it a lot over the past few weeks.

So much so that I posted something on  LinkedIn about this stating when I think of quality I think of Mathew Encina.

Who goes months between releasing YouTube videos.

But when he does it’s totally worth it.

Mathew commented back which feels like it could’ve come straight out of Cal’s book he said:

“Obsess, cause most people don’t”

And honestly, this feels like something I should get stuck up on my wall and look at daily.

I decided to take a risk this month (not really a risk because I had nothing to lose).

However, I applied to the  DatoCMS partner programme – the first headless CMS I used way back in 2017.

I held off because it said it’s for agencies and thought well that’s not me.

But I had a chat with them and got approved – which comes with some nice benefits meaning I can get my clients a discount on their plans and a totally new plan that’s only available for partners.

I still need to finish off my profile – but I do really like Dato as a product and the vibe the team gives off is the kind of thing I want to be associated with.

So the takeaway here – take a shot at that thing.