Review of 2025

Goal setting

Joseph Wright · · Pittsburgh

2909 Hours per Year

Like every year, I decided on three goals to work torwards in 2025 and all three were proudly achieved.

For a decade I've picked goals by reflecting on the year and seriously asking myself "what do I want by next year?"

It takes two weeks to sort out and this time it was more overwhelming but also exciting.

This time I reviewed all the things I wanted to do and realized I drastically needed to prioritize:

"a lack of time is a lack of priorities"

A big theme of the year was to simplify: Get things out of sight, reduce scope, stop freezing, keep moving.

"The perfect is the enemy of the good"

Like always, I stressed in picking the "best" goals. The challenge is to write out the specific outcomes you want for the year as if they were guaranteed wishes to a genie: they should be specific and actionable and exciting.

200 Initial Projects

After 10 years I have a good amount of data in my systems to model out a very rough time budget:

  • Waking free time: 56 hours / week
  • Task completion rate: 10 tasks / week
  • Task duration: 6 hours / task
  • Hours needed to complete backlog: 3539 hours (630 hours above yearly budget)
  • Tasks creation rate: 24 tasks / week
  • Task growth rate: 1.4% new tasks / week
  • Initial task count to fit in time budget: 216 tasks
  • Tasks per project: 6 tasks / project
  • Project tree depth for 200 tasks: 4 levels

The metrics set an informed starting point of 200 "things". These include even boring little tasks; it's everything (every thing I normally track). It multiplies into 1200 hours which is 40% of the year. This restriction is smarter than overbooking because we know life and projects inflate at a rate of new 1.4% tasks per week.

Note: I'd love to go deeper and be more sound with this data but I am moving on. The big break down in this model is the variance in how good I am at making actionable tasks in my tracker...

Clustering

Next I reviewed my previous year and made of list of important or exciting tasks to possibly devote time for:

  • Play soccer
  • Taxes
  • Read more
  • Home improvement
  • Zone 2 training
  • Home computer lab
  • Music collection
  • Draw more
  • Going to the gym
  • Clean the garage
  • Build an iOS app
  • Sleep better
  • Keep a journal
  • Travel
  • 30+ other things...

Clustering this list I came up with these 6 unsurprising groups:

  • Fun (11 items)
  • Fitness (12 items)
  • House (3 items)
  • Planning / Reflection (7 items)
  • Financial security (7 items)
  • Nerd projects (9 items)

2026 Planning

I have brainstormed some new goals that I feel excited and decisive about already. The momentum from the last year made that easy. I'll need to condense them into the final 3 goals.

For 2026 I collected 80 random projects and themes. I'll be organizing those into my year budget of 200 projects.

These objectives are important for giving a structure and narrative for the year. It's a success to make any expressible progress. It's a success to figure out that an objective was not what you needed. It's a success to keep showing up.

When looking back on the year and week by week these goals allow you to see yourself moving with purpose.. It really paid off since I knew exactly what was on track and what was a distraction.

New and Good habits of 2025

  1. Delete social apps every Sunday night
  2. Concept of the "consistent starter" from Neil Fiore book The Now Habit
  3. Prioritizing more protein
  4. Cooking steaks in the oven
  5. Morning walks to set circadian rhythm
  6. Rope flow exercise
  7. Zone 2 training for improving mood and sleep
  8. Hobonichi Techo Cousin notebook
  9. Going caffeine free for months
  10. Stop shopping at Trader Joes
  11. Doing 4-7-8 belly breathing (learning what belly breathing feels like)
  12. Setting a low bar for success
  13. Going to a weekly ice bath club
  14. Drastically culling visual clutter