A comic version of a white guy with short hair, smiling.

Yearly Themes 2024

· Frankfurt, Germany

Instead of setting a fixed goal as my New Year’s resolution, only to then not even make it through January, I’m setting Yearly Themes. CGP Grey has a great video on them, here’s a quote:

For some things, precision matters, for others, it doesn’t and when trying to build yourself into a better version of yourself, exact data points don’t matter. All that matters, is the trend line.

Yearly Themes act as a signpost to give your year a direction—the idea is to keep them in mind when making decisions, no matter how small.

Looking back at 2023

My 2023 started with two themes:

Year of Business

In the past, most of my side projects were open-source and/or non-profit. I wanted to dive into figuring out if side projects with actual revenue was something I wanted to pursue.

Year of Adventure

I have a desk job and work from home and while I enjoy watching outdoor media, I have very little actual experience.

In the second half of 2023 I switched themes1 to:

Year of Balance

My time is mostly divided into family, work, side projects and leisure. I want to be conscious of keeping a balance in my time invested.

I’m okay with how Year of Business and Year of Adventure went; I have a better idea of what it takes to turn a hobby project into something that generates revenue, and we’re leasing an orchard2.

Year of Balance went really well, I’m now doing a better job allocating the time to what’s important to me.

Yearly Themes 2024

These are my Yearly Themes for next year:

Year of Fillilng The Gaps

I’ve made progress in many areas in my life over the last few years. I feel like that created “gaps” in some less interesting areas. This year, I want to invest in these areas to raise the overall base-line of myself.

Year of Fitness

After doing Year of Health at twice, I aim to focus on improving, instead of maintaining, my fitness. One metric for this could be my VO₂ max, which my Apple Watch conveniently automatically records for me3.

What’s yours?

Do you do New Year’s resolutions or Yearly Themes, or something entirely different? What do they look like? I’d love to hear from you.

  1. Yes, you’re allowed to do that. ↩

  2. Not really adventurous, but hey, I’m outside more! ↩

  3. Thankfully, it still has an oxygen sensor ↩