New Year's Resolutions (2025)

Happy New Year, everyone!

Thought we’d be social not just matter-of-factly-business-minded every now and again?

I have a few big items that are just going to be on auto-pilot (enforced through either work or relationships), but for the things I have control of, I have set a challenge for myself to just set a high score for number of books read this year. No actual goal, just pretending I’ve never read before, and trying to see what number I get to by December 31st. So far I’m one and a half books in.

EDIT: Second sub-goal is “no new projects”. I aim to set a second high score for “number of open projects completed in a year”. Again, no actual goal number, just an open highway feeling of hoping to really impress myself.

What’s on everyone else’s hopes list for this year?

Nice one. Definitely more reading for me as well, as a consequence of my own desire to check less nonsense on the internet. Six days in and it’s working really well.

I’m curious what you’re reading? I’ve had Frank Trentmann’s Empire of Things on the shelf for ages so I’m in to that. Ties in nicely with our recent purge of household items – after the office we spent the next week chucking away a bunch of stuff from the rest of the house. 100% recommended.

I just burned through the Jack Reacher short story collection, and now I’ve got the War of the Worlds ebook out from the library on my iPad.

I read someone’s list of tips on how to read more and the couple that stood out were:

  1. If you don’t like a book, stop reading it! Full agree here.
  2. Have one fiction and two non-fiction on the go. Then you can read whatever you’re in the mood for.

@johnnydecimal you might like
Dr Anna Lempka - dopamine nation

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Reserved from the library! :smiley:

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So far I’ve read Jimmy Carr’s Before & Laughter, and David Bessis’s Mathematica. I highly recommend only the latter. It’s rare that a book tickles one’s sense of curiosity. There’s books that kickstart it, or books that drive it. But this book only points it out, then shows how it can be turned into math. Very cute, confidence inducing book.

Ohh this is a trick I should pick up.

Next book up is Anna Karenina, but I am afraid of its length so having some non fiction on the side might be nice.

Ooh the latter looks right up my alley. As one might imagine, I’m a bit of a maths nerd.

Happy new year everyone! Looks like I haven’t actually posted here even though I’ve been lurking for ages. Seems like a good thread for me to make my first post though.

I don’t do new year’s resolutions per se as (being in Australia) December tends to be a stressful end-of-the-work-year period and that’s not the best mindset for me to bring to planning. Generally over Christmas to mid-January I make some time to do a sort of yearly review with the help of YearCompass. If nothing else, I try to come up with a word phrase/theme for the new year.

I do have one JD-related short-term project pencilled in for January though: simplify/consolidate my system/s. I discovered JD a few years ago when I was studying part time and doing a bit of freelance/consulting in my previous career, so I built a PRO.AC.ID system. Johnny’s moved on from that, and my life is a bit simpler now (I graduated and am working in my new field) so I can at least think of replacing the various ‘PRO’/project prefixes with a smaller set. The twist is that I graduated in library science so I have to resist the temptation to Dewey Decimal everything :slightly_smiling_face:

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YOU DID WHAT

Please at your leisure start a new thread and tell us things we don’t know.

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I second that!

This is very cool. For me 2024 was a year of finding direction, and I’d say I did that pretty well, but I haven’t caught up on my year yet.

I just printed YearCompass, and the JD 93 Workbook Section. I’ve organized my personal projects area in my JD by emotional needs that the projects fulfill. I’ll go through YearCompass first to catch up on last year and see how I feel about it all, then double back through the workbook to see if I missed any glaring emotional needs in my JD system.

Thanks for the rec! I’d also be curious if you’ve done YearCompass more than once or twice if you ever see re-occurrences? Like if you feel your life is somehow some kind of loop?

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I started reading, but temporarily putting the read on hold. Would love to hear your thoughts on it once you get a chance to read it

I think I started doing YearCompass just before or during the pandemic, and funnily enough, the first few years did feel like a loop :frowning:

I didn’t do it last year because I felt stuck in a rut which is … a great reason to do YearCompass. I haven’t completed 2024-2025 yet but I’m trying to be more intentional about observing how things have been changing (maybe even improving) in my life and in how I view the world.

I have a whole stack of blog posts and forum posts that I want to start … when I get round to this one I’ll start a thread or maybe stick it in Dewey Decimal system :slightly_smiling_face:

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How did your YearCompass go?

For me 2025 is the year of “closing chapters”. One way or another I’m ending the year mentally lighter by either tying a bow or writing an ending on many of my open storylines.

One of those chapters is a July/August knitting together of all my previous blogs/posts into a new more minimal/maintainable blog. If you get to that time scale and want a writing buddy, happy to do weekly check ins or quiet zoom writing hours for shared motivation. :slight_smile:

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@claudinec @clappingcactus unstarted and unfinished blog posts take up about half of my daily brain space. I like the idea of putting a timeline on when you’ll deal with that. Please count me in when/if you feel the need for a writing accountability group, anyone.

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Interesting. Anything you’re comfortable sharing?

We are in a similar situation. Close/open. I’ll write a couple of blog posts in the next day or two once I’m mentally able. Until then, wish us luck.

You know, life’s a funny thing. I’m about to say so much that’s inappropriate for one reason or another, but it’s the truth.

January/February: Filing my life into my JD system. If it works and stays robust for a whole year without tinkering, then I’m happy. If it doesn’t, and I realize I need to tinker with it again, it’s time for therapy. (Only half joking) I’ve spent so much time working on an “ideal” system that I’ve postponed so much work/goals. Some of it ended up being a good thing, some goals would have just been Sisyphean wastes of time. Others, I wish I did. So no more tinkering. It’s time to “put up”, as the saying goes.

March/April: Setup a weekly sports routine. For about six years now I’ve been struggling to play the sports I am used to (badminton, squash, football). It’s just, between two inter-continental moves, getting a dog, changing jobs four times, I’ve struggled to find a consistent physical routine/group for exercise. In those months, I’ll give a try to just succeed at any one of the sports. If I fail, I just retire from those as sources of fun, and open up myself to the idea that there are other sports I can start playing now that are better suited to my life and stage (thinking about picking up some body-weight training rings and floor bars).

May/June: The great culling. It will hurt a bit, but I’m going to minimize my life and the stuff in it. I’m probably ending up with unused sports equipment from the above, and a clearer view of how my hobbies and spare time should be spent (for example if I learn to pay attention to what’s actually available to do in my free time). There will be two rules here. Rule 1 is “Do I still do X?” and Rule 2 is “Is this item the thing I actually use to do X, or is it a thing that I got to do X in a specific way that’s just a resource drain?”

Hoping to finish the first half of my year with a clear head and lighter heart… for…

July/August: Self-expression months. I hope to put my blog back up, and work on a personal research project. For years I’ve been saying I want to do “science” as a “citizen”, not as a professional, and I’ve carved these months out to get out there and do something “casually” without pressure of results or publication. I mean, publishing as a series of blog posts, but not with any real academic rigor. I hope to come up with a field-friendly protocol to do an inter-dependent biome analysis (how much of bird biodiversity can I predict from forest floor biodiversity is the question). It’s the kind of dumb question that no one ought to do as a serious scientist because the experiment can fail spectacularly and technically on every level. But, I want to find out for myself if I can ever do science in my spare time, or if it’s just a professional thing, and I need to look for sources of meaning elsewhere.

September/October: Based on the results of the above, I’m planning to either take music classes, or setup a solo board gaming habit. For years I’ve told myself I’d like to learn how to play music because having one additional “axis” of “creativity” and “self-expression” in my life. It would make life feel richer, it would make me think outside the box, yadda yadda. But it’s always somewhere on the horizon. If I won’t derive meaning from “work”, then I’ll take this chance of a new understanding of myself to try a new branch of life. If work ends up being surprisingly meaning-friendly, then I’ll just use my spare time/energy to enjoy puzzles/logical games in my spare time for tickling my curiosity in unexpected ways. No need for learning a whole new skillset and starting another story.

November/December: The heavy one. My partner might move again. If she does, we’ve left it as a question mark as to where we end up on a personal level. I’m not going to move again. At least not for 5 or so years. If she stays, I propose. If she leaves, we have a real conversation about how much of a relationship can be spent long distance, as it would be our second time doing it.

Maybe this got too personal, and maybe I delete this post in a month, because I’m not sure how much of my personal life I want publicly available on a forum. But then again, maybe we all ought to be more open and expressive in life, to let one another know that it’s all a big mess, and nobody knows anything.

For a lighter topic;

I have kept up my reading habit.

I’ve now read Ted Chiang’s Exhalation. I so recommend the first two short stories “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,”, “Exhalation,” and the last short story, “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom,” for everyone to read. He likes to write about worlds with one or two facts from our own flipped, and from there there’s an expansion about how we ought to live life earnestly regardless of how trapped we may feel or be.

I also read Sir Paul Nurse’s What is Life?. Paul’s of course one of the greatest living scientists, but I think he should have written three books instead of this one. There are three audiences he tries to address simultaneously, and for that, the book is weaker. I’d be curious if any non-biologists ever read it what they would think. I thought the ramp-up of jargon was too quick for the book to serve as anything of an introduction to biological sciences.

Finally, I also read Terry Pratchett’s Discworld 4 - Mort. My first reading in this classic series. I can see why it is so loved. I’ll likely read another book in the series just for the joy of having so much fun while reading. Not sure if it will become a habit, but certainly I want another dose.

Still reading Anna Karenina… beautiful, not shallow, full of joie de vivre, but goodness, I might fail at finishing this book again. Ha.

Thanks so much for sharing.

yeah, me too, including the half-joking part …

There’s a lot in here that’s very familiar to me. I wish you well.

I have a couple of blog posts I need to try to type up today. Change is afoot here at JDHQ … mostly really great, with a good dose of tragedy thrown in because that’s life.

:grimacing: