The end of the year, for me, is a time of very high motivation. My intention is to run through the new year with whatever goals I was planning. I adjust and figure out what I can actually do.

I also put in permanent (or hard to change) environmental changes. I believe in Environment Hacking, where I put things in my environment that trigger my behavior or remove things that are triggering behavior I don’t want. For example, to get off of nearly all social media, I removed the apps and blocked the sites in my /etc/hosts file.

My motivation goes up and down throughout the year. I am personally highly motivated from January through my birthday in early April, which happens to coincide with the first thirteen weeks of the year. I use this time to plan for when my motivation will crater. I do things that will make it easy to keep on track. For me this means not having to plan, just execute.

Here are some examples of what I have done when my motivation is high:

1. When I feel like cooking, I cook something healthy in bulk. I’ll have something good to eat later when I don’t feel like cooking. I buy tempeh in bulk and freeze it.
2. I use widgets on my phone homepage to show me how I am doing with goals or help me do them (e.g. DuoLingo and Cronometer).
3. I have a pull-up bar in my office to encourage me to dead hang more. There’s a dumbbell set next to my desk. I have a underdesk pedaler. I am generally trying to make my day less sedentary.
4. I bought a print that I find inspiring and hung it above my monitor (more on this later).

The general idea is to put things in places where you can’t help to see them to make it easy to do the behavior later when your motivation drops.