Annual Review, 2026

It is late February. My birthday was in January, which means the new year arrived twice in the span of a few weeks: once on the calendar, and once again when I turned a year older. Two resets in quick succession have a way of forcing clarity.

This is my first formal annual review. I have had intentions before, but intentions without commitment are just wishes, and I have been wishing long enough.

The question worth asking upfront: why bother? The cynical answer is that most resolutions fail. The real answer is that writing is a forcing function for prioritization, and prioritization is the actual work. Anyone can want everything. The constraint is attention, and attention is finite. Writing forces you to choose, and choosing means admitting that what is not on the list does not get your best effort. That is uncomfortable, which is probably why most people avoid it.

This year, I have two goals: Health and Attention.

That is it. Two areas. I could have written ten. I did not, because ten goals is the same as no goals.

Health as Infrastructure

I spent most of my twenties treating my body as a given. Sleep was optional. Exercise was occasional. The implicit assumption was that youth provides a buffer, and the bill comes later.

The bill is coming due.

This is not a dramatic revelation. The compounding nature of physical health is well-documented. The habits you build in your thirties determine your capacity in your forties and beyond. Muscle mass, cardiovascular fitness, metabolic health: these are systems that require maintenance, and deferred maintenance is still a cost, just a hidden one.

My goal is to build automatic behaviors, because the key insight from the research on behavior change is this: willpower is depletable, but habits are not. The gym should require no more deliberation than brushing my teeth.

The specifics: 250 gym days and 250 days of 10,000 steps, roughly five days a week with a buffer for life. Walking is underrated by people who have not tried it seriously; my best thinking happens when I am moving, not when I am sitting at a desk trying to force it. Gym and steps are the inputs. The output is bloodwork: I had a checkup recently, and I want objective improvement the next time I see those numbers.

Sleep is the one that will actually be hard. I have averaged less than six hours for two years, staying up late and waking up early out of habit. Sleep is when recovery happens, and I have been skipping recovery. The immediate target is shifting my wake-up time to 7:00 AM, which requires fixing the other end of the equation.

The framing I keep returning to: health is infrastructure. Everything else runs on top of it. Ignoring it is technically possible for a while, but the failure mode is not gradual decline; it is sudden incapacity at the worst possible moment.

The Attention Problem

The second goal is harder to quantify, which is probably why it took longer to take seriously.

I work hybrid, with office days that include nearly three hours of commuting. That is time that cannot be reclaimed, which means the time at home has to be used well. The problem is that it often is not, and the mechanism is straightforward: smartphones are designed to capture attention, and they are very good at what they are designed to do.

Here is the honest version: I checked my screen time and did not like the number. Hours per day, many of them spent on nothing I would consciously choose to prioritize. The phone is a tool, but I have been using it as a default. That is not a willpower failure; it is a design outcome. The apps are optimized for engagement, which means they are optimized against presence.

The goal is not to eliminate the phone. Three hours is still significant screen time. But three hours is a real constraint, one that preserves the phone as a useful tool for calls, messages, and reading while cutting out the passive consumption that fills every empty moment.

The second habit is stranger and more important: get bored.

I mean this literally. I have structured every idle moment to avoid boredom. Waiting somewhere? Phone. Walking? Podcast. Any gap in stimulation is immediately filled. The cost is that I have no quiet time, and quiet time is when you think about your own life rather than consuming content about someone else’s.

Boredom is also when you reach out to people. When I am unstimulated, I call someone. When I have a phone in my hand, I scroll. The connection between phone reduction and relationship maintenance is not abstract; it is behavioral. Attention is finite. Where you spend it is, over time, who you become.

Two Goals, One Argument

The underlying logic of both goals is the same: optimize for presence over consumption.

Health is presence in the body. You cannot be fully available to the people who matter when you are running on sleep debt and a system that has been neglected for a decade. Attention is presence in relationships. You cannot maintain those on the leftover attention after the phone has taken its share.

I will not track this obsessively. Quarterly check-ins to see whether the habits are holding, adjustments where they are not. The goal is direction, not perfection. What matters is whether, across a long enough timeline, the trend is the right one. Publishing is the other half of the accountability structure. Goals written down become concrete; goals published become real.

The rest is execution.