2025 Goals
2024 was a whirlwind of a year. I worked hard, launched things in September and then travelled a lot. I went to Amsterdam, London, Dublin, terdam, Dubai, Vegas, Seattle, all of this with short stints at home. I was supposed to go to India in Jan for friend’s marriages, but I was way too tired. So it took a lot of effort, but I said no. Instead, I spent time at home trying to build a routine.
I decided that 2025 will be about cultivating good habits. I have previously set lofty new year goals and resolutions only to see them slip. So this year, I will cultivate good habits, and be kind to myself when they inevitably slip.
I had a few requirements for the habits:
- Need to be achievable at the end of a workday
- Useful when done only twice a week.
- Must make my sabbatical (May-July) better.
The reasoning is that number based goals aren’t really important and impossible to achieve unless you enjoy process as well. The journey must be reward in itself.
So Ive come up with the following things I enjoy:
- Cooking
- Eating Healthy
- Sleeping 7 hours
- Working out (badminton, Cycling, Climbing, etc.)
- Writing
- Socializing
- Reading
I’ve been tracking how I’ve been doing on those everyday with a check-in, and it’s been a good signal. It’s okay to not do them every day but if too many days pass without a check-in, it’s a signal. I’ve been doing well with a few of them, but others are a little too sporadic for my liking. This week in particular has been quite unproductive, but I am going to take a quick break and reset.
One of the requirements is that the habits need to be easy enough to be done on a workday. Which means I’ve had to come up with hacks to make things easy. For example, I spend 4 hours on Saturday making a huge batch of the base Onion and tomato masala with 1.2 KG Onion and 1.5 KG Tomatoes. I then store it in a box that I can vacuum. This keeps in the fridge for a week.
Now, making Rajma means: coming home, throwing some of this masala, Rajma spice and soaked Rajma in the Pressure cooker and going to shower while it cooks. Come out, make rice and voila! Good food made easy. With this trick, we went from ordering daily (almost) to not ordering at all (almost). It’s been more than 10 days since I ordered food.
Similarly, I found a spin class on the way back from work which makes things easier.
I must admit, travelling makes habits hard. But I do get to see the people I love, so I am OK with the tradeoffs. I am looking forward to February and March where I have no travel planned.
While I tried to make things easy, they certainly haven’t been. My days and long and exhausting. I am used to working long hours and coming back and relaxing on the couch. Now I work slightly shorter hours, but I have to squeeze a lot of things into my day. It’s tiring.
The solution is clear, drawing better boundaries work and stop thinking about it once I am home. Before even considering the difficulty, I don’t like the sound of it. But I am going to take the next three months figuring it out. And then comes the sabbatical.