Daily habits

Last year I prioritized my physical fitness for the first time in my life, and fell in love with running. That set of choices had a profoundly positive impact on my life. Beyond all the health and fitness benefits, it changed my perspective. My confidence was different. The stranglehold that work had on my self-worth started to loosen as I poured my free time into doing hard things that had nothing to do with my job.

That set of choices around health and fitness — dropping fast food, tracking my weight, lifting weights, and running — changed from aspirations to habits once I started tracking them every day.

This year, my aim was to take that approach and apply it beyond fitness. To invest in being a whole human, not just a work monkey. Specifically, my goals were to:

1. Read 24 books (a goal I've set and missed every year)
2. Make journaling a habit
3. Run 10 miles per week (aka stick to the habit)

I’m thrilled with how those goals went:

• I finished 55 books. I had never even come close to my goal of 24 in the past. This year was different. I had an audiobook and a Kindle book in progress almost every day this year so that at any point I could choose to read vs doing something else, and that made a world of difference.
• I journaled 294 times. Not every day, but that’s… 287 times more than last year, so I’ll take it. This habit dramatically improved my anxiety, and enabled me to be more present.
• I ran 550 miles. Certainly not 10 every week — I don’t think I’ve run 10 total in the last month — but between the peaks and valleys I hit my 520, and loved every one of them. Two half marathons this year were a particular highlight, and an 18 mile run the week before we met Isaac. Next year I’ll take on a full marathon.

Whether those are impressive achievements are not doesn’t really matter — hopefully next year I’ll laugh at 550 miles. What does matter is that on Jan 1, 2025 these things looked hard, but they were important. I needed to turn them into habits so that I actually spent time on the things that were important to me.

And this silly little daily habit tracking page in my journal has made all the difference.

Every day I mark which habits I hit, and as a result:

1. I get to look forward to that slightest bit of gratification at the end of a “perfect” day
2. I get the visual representation of what is and isn’t going well so I know what to focus on, and
3. I get the tremendous benefit of having turned each of these things into daily habits.

The volume each day doesn’t matter. 1 page vs. 100 pages, 1 mile vs. 10 miles, it’s all the same. When my focus shifted to doing something every day to invest in the habits that matter to me, they stuck, and I changed.

There’s something remarkable that happens when you believe you’re a person who can create new habits for yourself. I have that belief now — I can literally show you the paper evidence of it.

Here’s to new habits in 2026 for the both of us.