I read Atomic Habits at the end of 2023 and here's how my 2024 went

For 2024, I laid out a few basic goals for myself and then implemented daily habits and a habit tracking system to go along with. I'll lay out the goals, how they went, and how I can improve (or drop).

But first, if you haven't read or heard about it already, Atomic Habits is a great book by James Clear . Despite it's popularity, I never felt the desire to prioritize reading it because I figured I already knew the essence of the book through application in personal health and fitness. Nonetheless, I went through it and found it quite helpful in putting some structure around the concept.

At the same time, I've never been one for annual goal planning. I eventually realized that comes from my career largely being spent in Sales with a fiscal quarter/yearly calendar that ruled my life - both professionally and personally. I guess I got into that rhythm subconsciously and I spent a while basically re-wiring a couple things... those couple things couple be their own write ups ??

High Level Goals

• Time efficiency - I'm always wanting to get more done while feeling there aren't enough hours in the day
• Learn programming - This was to be the year that I finally sat down and really worked at this.
• Produce more diverse content - Both in format and topics.
• Plus a couple more minor goals and personal goals

Implementation

I've been a long time on/off user of Trello. I seem to get attracted to new and shinier tools but I found myself back in Trello after reading how someone implemented their Daily Habit tracking through it. There's plenty of tutorials on how to do it and it fit with how I like to use Trello.

Here's a few of my habit routines and a pass/fail grade for each one.

Evaluate time efficiency opportunities - WEEKLY

• Overall fail
• I meant to spend a bit of time every Sunday night and look at what I could do better to save time. I started off great for a few weeks but then found myself doing this more randomly than routinely. I give myself a semi-pass but overall I could certainly do a lot better.

Start programming - DAILY

• Last minute pass
• This daily routine sat undone most days. Finally towards the end of the year, knowing I wanted to have this skill a bit built up for 2025, I started a Python course online and really enjoyed it (the course is called Python for Everybody on Coursera). I did a bit of the course every day and it's been a worth while investment of time that I wish I'd done sooner for the sake of my time in my previous role. I have daily ways to apply what I've learned daily and now I've moved on to learning Rust so I can play with WebAssembly.

Take in diverse content - DAILY

• Pass
• Not that this was hard, I consume lots of content. But I made an effort to look at content from different perspectives - business level, technical level, blogs, different mediums. No different than my previous role, I get into conversations that range from technical engineering and up to C-level executives. I also need to be able to produce content that speaks to different audience levels. Humbly speaking, I do believe from the decade I spent speaking to businesses and selling technology with the perspective of enhancing a business, combined with my own finance knowledge from my style of investing, I feel I have a strength here. But being intentional with this and combined with some responsibilities I had taken on internally, I felt I reached a new level.

So what will I do for 2025?

Keep habits small

What I didn't get into was that there were definitely other Fails. What I confirmed was that daily habits need to be kept pretty small. At the time of execution, there's room to expand when you have time. But if you make them large tasks that you can't slim down, it's a fail for that day and after a few fails, it will definitely drop entirely.

Look to improve my tracker

I kept things pretty barebones. I have some ideas for ways to improve and have been working on some organization that needs to happen before that.

Add time to create a daily plan

I'm still someone who looks at my big list of things I'm working on and prioritized on the fly. I looked at getting into the habit of daily planning but I really didn't set myself up for success. I need to do a bit more strategizing around this to make it stick.

How about yourselves?

Enough about me. How does habit tracking look for you? And do you have a daily planning habit? Would love to get feedback from others!