It’s a new year, and I feel like I need to make some changes. 2023 was an incredible year for me and Xpress AI, and next year has the potential to be even better if I can make some personal changes. One of which is to get back into writing more hence why I’m restarting my blog. The main things I want to work on in 2024 are:
- Get back to blogging
- Exercise regularly
- Eat less sugars
- Finish all the books on my bookshelf
- Limiting YouTube and social media to essentials
- Get more organized in Obsidian
- Become relentless at following up
Getting back to blogging
I think blogging is not only a good way to share thoughts with the world, but also a great way to internalize stuff. It’s easy to have fuzzy thoughts about a topic but not have strong opinions on it because you haven’t forced yourself to think it through. Writing things down really forces you to do that since we have to write in words and not probability distributions. It would also be a great way to share my ideas on our product and AI in general as this stuff really doesn’t fit well in tweet sized content.
Been thinking a lot recently about how things have changed since the days of IRC, feed readers and forums and mailing lists. On the surface, it doesn’t look like things have changed all that much with the modern alternatives of Discord, Reddit, news sites and Twitter, but I think there’s something lost in the relative shallowness of the modern formats. I’ll probably have to write a whole blog post on the specifics sometime later, but for now, I think longer form, and more personal content is what the world needs more of.
I also have like 10 posts that I’ve started but have never finished. It would be great to actually publish them.
Exercise
It’s definitely a staple of new year’s resolutions, I know. I do have a gym membership, but I don’t use it as regularly as I like. The main thing that I think holds me back is enough sleep. So I’ll probably have to commit to getting more sleep if I want to make progress on my exercise goals. Looking back the most productive times of 2023 were when I was getting exercise into my routine.
Eating better
Eating less sugars is a hard one because I think in general my brain really needs some energy after working through something difficult. Exercise does help I think, but just staying away from sugar is the best way to have less sugar cravings. My weight and sugar intake are highly correlated so you’ll be able to tell how I’m doing by how I look.
Finishing books
The amount of tsundoku I have going on is getting to be ridiculous. Social media and Youtube are probably the biggest contributors to unread books, so staying away from them is probably the best way to get back to reading. The crazy thing is just how much I want to read the stack of books on my kindle… just never get the time.
Limiting YouTube
I’ve actually done this a couple of times. Earlier this year I installed pihole and straight up blocked YouTube, Hacker News and all the other time sink sites that I noticed I spent way too much time on. I think I had some of the most productive weeks following that, before I get sucked into it again. I’ve started blocking it again recently and think that things are better.
The main thing that gets me is that seeing things causes distractions. It also causes some great correlations too, but nowhere near as much as it distracts. Many people say it’s really just the recommendations that cause issues and there are extensions that block them. I’ve got both extensions and network blockers running. Having both is definitely the way to go.
Getting organized
Obsidian is a great tool that similar to blogging, helps me think better. But not everything should be a public blog post. Obsidian has many great tools for helping organize thoughts, but there’s also Logseq which I want to try since I use daily notes in general.
Become relentless at following up
This is probably the most impactful thing I think I can do in terms of the business. So many things this year have ended in the ball going to the other’s court and no progress made after that. I of course don’t want to become known as a pushy person so I’ll have to work on following up in the appropriate way, but I will be making sure I have an agent or tool of some sort that reminds me to just follow up after a certain time. I’d much rather have things end explicitly than just leaving “doors open” for some opportunity later.
Why this post
I have no intention on making this blog completely into a 90s style journal, but I did want to write this list down in public so that I can hold myself accountable to it later. Things like this are important parts of the building in public ideal, that served me very well when I was doing it earlier last year. Hopefully I can keep it up all year. Feel free to bring these up dear reader if we ever meet in person. I’d appreciate it.
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