On this blog, when I talk about my annual plans, I am talking about aspirations. The vast majority of my time is spent on living my normal life: work, home, cooking, travel, time with wife, family, and friends, etc. When I look back at 2024, I see what I can do with my marginal time—an hour for fitness and a couple of hours a day to either write or work on my own software added up to a lot.

So, this year I hope to apply that lesson to marketing my finished work better. My strategy is to create content that supports it. I will toot, blog, post on LinkedIn, and email my list — but try to make the content useful in of itself (not promotional). I also want to podcast and YouTube too, but that’s a stretch goal. The written posts don’t take very long—but podcasting and videos are much harder for me.

For fitness, I am going to swim at least twice a week. My apartment has a pool, but I rarely take advantage of it. I need low-impact cardio alternatives anyway, but this will also remind me of my book (Swimming in Tech Debt) and my general 2025 theme to “Just Keep Swimming”. Another advantage to swimming is that it’s very hard to listen to something while doing it, so I have 30 minutes with just my own thoughts—it’s very meditative. It’s an analog hobby that affords solitude (like in Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport [affiliate link]).

My work since the late nineties has been mostly in developer tools or tools for productivity, and even the startup I’ve been working on is in this general area (personal productivity). I want to expand on this. I have ideas for tools that support the themes I write about, and I want to explore those in 2025. To play on my book title and theme, the ideas are fins (to help you go faster) and goggles (to help you see debt better)—I wrote about Tech Debt Detectors on this site and in my book, and these ideas are variations on that.

I’m going to apply The Four Disciplines of Execution [affiliate link] like I did last year, which I’ll write about later this week.