At the beginning of the year, I set out to do three things along the three areas of my life: personal growth, career, and fitness. I had mixed results.

For personal growth, I set a goal to write a 50-page book on a subject in software development. I have been blogging for over 20 years, so I looked over my posts for material and found that I had written a lot about technical debt. I thought there was enough there for a short book, but it needed to be organized and expanded.

I set a goal to write for at least one hour on five days of each week, which was enough to get to fifty pages in a couple of months. It was easy to keep to this schedule because, following the advice of The Four Disciplines of Execution [affiliate link], I joined a writing accountability group. We met three times a week to write together, but adopting their culture of sharing works in progress had the biggest effect on my work. Sharing my text exposed me to conversations that helped me think more deeply about my subject. I didn’t finish the book I set out to write, but I have about 160+ pages with an editor right now, and I plan to release it by March 2025 (sign-up to be notified).

For my career, I wanted to release an MVP of a startup idea I am working on with a friend. We did get an MVP, but realized that it wasn’t the right product, so we pivoted. We are getting close to the next MVP, which is a complete rewrite of the front-end. We hope to onboard a cohort of users in January. I’ll talk about it more when it’s ready to look at.

For fitness, I tried to lose body fat. I tried a lot of things and kept to all of my exercise goals, but nothing I did had an effect. I am satisfied with my overall fitness, but it would have been nice to achieve this. In 2025, I am not going to worry about this any more. I am healthy, and I think I just need to accept my body for what it is: fit, but with a belly.

For each of the three things, I had varying levels of commitment to the actions I set out to do. Writing the book had the highest adherence, probably because of the accountability group. I also had feedback in the middle of the year that people liked my work so far (an excerpt was published in The Pragmatic Engineer). My fitness routine was also easy to follow, also because I was in a group. Working on the startup was harder—there is some accountability, but both of us are doing this on the side, so it gets less time.

In my plan for 2025, I mostly just want to build on what worked in 2024 and finish things up. Here’s what worked and I’ll keep doing

1. Working in a group—especially literally meeting and working at the same time
2. Sharing work in progress
3. Concentrating on hours spent doing activities that will build up to a goal (the lead indicators)

I need to stop doing these things:

1. Worrying about the things that I might never achieve (like losing body fat)
2. Setting bars too high on skills in progress. I keep wanting to podcast more, but I’m held back by my inner-audience that doesn’t think it’s good enough.

And I need to start these new things:

1. Pushing myself out of my comfort zone. In 2025 I need to do marketing for the work that I have done, which means I have to put myself out there more.
2. Paying more attention to what I eat in addition to my exercise.