"You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems." - James Clear

A new year means new opportunities. From staying on top of the latest technologies to making time to find the stillness to journal daily. I have a lot of goals this year, and they all start with putting new systems in place to make my improvement a daily habit

Technology: Code & Work with AI every day.

After a year of Product management I was really pleased to see that my coding skills hadn’t faded away. With weekly code reviews with my front end team and daily standups, mixed with how much time I spent reading technical documentation for our APIs and Blockchains we were integrating with, I almost feel like I got better at programming. My algorithms are certainly rusty, and I would love to work in some practice there, but for now my goals are coding at least one commit every weekday, and writing AI prompts 3 days a week. I have been enjoying diving into Chat GBT & Midjourney and discovering what they are capable of by implementing them in my websites. Check out Midjourney Madness as an example my work.

Personal Growth & Self Improvement:

Another daily practice I have been improving my consistency with is journaling. In December, I started writing a bit of long form Journaling in a composition book, but it wasn’t consistent. I picked up two books by Ryan Holiday over at Daily Stoic that have been a really huge help making it a routine.

“The Daily Stoic” is 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living. It has bite sized chunks that are one page for each day, and a theme for each month.

“The Daily Stoic Journal” has a half page dedicated to morning reflection and the other half to evening reflection. Each day has a small prompt (that connects to the Daily Stoic reading if you are doing both, but is also a good judge on its own). At the start of every week, there is a one pager of wisdom relating to the process of journaling.

I’m usually able to knock these both out in 15-20 minutes with my cup of coffee in the morning, but most importantly the prompts make that time productive, and I never find myself sitting there with a pen staring at a blank page. I get tons of value out of it, but that deserves a post of its own.

Health & Fitness

After running the Dallas Marathon on December 11th 2022, I took a few weeks off that I let devolve into stagnation. Routines are everything and trying to get going again really feels like starting over. My system for the first few months will be alternating days of running with weightlifting or structured bodyweight workouts. I haven’t been perfect, but I have been getting better, and that’s the name of the game. In order to make changes, you have to be ready to forgive mistakes. You can’t let a slip up (or three) make you give up on the whole process. You have to get back on that horse as they say. Since I am not training for anything in particular, I am enjoying a nice rotation.

Those are my main goals I am working on turning into systems for 2023. Another quote from James Clear and his book Atomic Habits would be a good way to wrap this up.

"If you're having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn't you, the problem is your system." - James Clear