It’s December 31st, 2023 as I’m writing this. It just turned past midnight and the rest of my family is asleep. I’m sitting on my couch in complete silence typing this enjoying my Christmas decorations for the last couple of days I’ll have them up this Holiday season. Life is great!
This has been a great year. The highlight was the birth of my son. I love him so much. He makes every day of my life so much better. After he was born was the first time in my life that I ever wished I could retire and just spend my days hanging out with him (and my other future kids).
Luckily even though I’m not retired I still have a lot of flexibility to spend time with him every day. I also enjoy what I do to make money so I have no complaints. I’m blessed.
With 2024 being just a day away I’ve been very reflective over the past year of my life the past week or so. I usually set goals every year so this is a fairly normal process for me to do every year. I decided not to set any concrete goals for 2024. Instead, I decided to ask myself a few questions.
- What were the best experiences I had this past year?
- What were the worst experiences I had this past year?
- What would I like my life to be like at the end of 2024?
- What would I like my life to be like at the end of 2026?
I’m still working on my answers to 3 & 4 but I took my answers from questions #1 and #2 and I plan to schedule more of the things that were “best” for me in 2023 in 2024 and eliminate as much as possible things that were the “worst” for me in 2023 in 2024.
So basically do more of what I enjoy and less of what I hate. The idea is to take action now to make those things happen by scheduling them out. For example, I enjoyed taking boxing lessons in 2023 but fell off after my son was born. I already talked to my coach and he is going to reach out to me next week to schedule lessons again.
An example of eliminating something I hate is I hate when I have multiple days in a row jam-packed full of things to do. I’m not a go-go-go person and need some time off after a day or two of activities especially now with a kid. So I’m just going to say no to things even if it makes someone else upset. Most of the time when I had a jam-packed schedule for a few days in a row it was because I was doing things to try to make other people happy.
Figuring out what I want my life to be like at the end of 2024 will help me to plan out what I want to be doing daily. I also want to make sure that lines up with what I want longer term which is why I also want to think about what I want my life to be like at the end of 2026. Trying to think more than 3 years out is just too difficult to predict.
I’ll write more about this over the next week. For now, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!