Hey! Happy New Year!

It's been a while.

These past 20 months have been a bit of a blur, but after a prolonged hiatus, I decided it was time to return to writing. While I'm not making any promises, it is a loose goal of mine to post bi-weekly again this year. We'll see how it goes!

Since you last heard from me, I've officially graduated from college and will be starting work in Chicago this month.

Although 2021 was the first year without posting since 2014, it was not without its own busyness, including:

• Becoming an entry level full stack developer using HTML/CSS & Ruby on Rails

• Working as a pro-bono consultant for non-profits in Chicago & Indianapolis

• Finishing my bachelor's thesis, titled Digital Nomadism and Global Governance: On Emergent Lifestyles and Visas in Estonia and Germany

• Studying abroad at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea

Amongst all of those, I also decided to try tracking a few key habits across all 365 days of 2021. The idea was to see which things I value by keeping a quantitative record to compare with my own qualitative perceptions and priorities. They are listed below alongside the percentage of days where I completed the habit:

• 8+ hours sleep (40%)

• Brief sun salutations (97%)

• Mindful breathing exercises (100%)

• Tea (82%)

• Workout (64%)

On April 18, about a week after finishing my thesis, I decided to add in one more daily habit: playing guitar, which I then met for 47% of the remaining days in 2021 or 33% of the total year.

Looking back on this project, tracking habits certainly supported the idea of what gets measured gets done, with the exception of sleep. Although the first three months of the year were incredibly busy, after that I didn't really have a good reason to not get 8 hours every night but still failed to do so.

Moving forward, I am going to keep this as a yearly process. In 2022 my focus will be to go deeper into each of these habits and focus on quality instead of just quantity. For example, instead of counting everything including a tea bag for the tea habit, I will only count matcha and loose leaf tea. I also added a column in the Notion database for swimming which comes in addition to working out (swimming counts as a workout, but not all workouts are swimming). Primarily though, my biggest goal for this project as well as for 2022 in general honestly is to improve my relationship with sleep and get that number up from 40% to 70% or higher. This will be a big challenge for me, so please feel free to check in and provide accountability if you think about it! Every bit helps.

Do you have any New Year's Resolutions or goals for 2022? I'd love to hear about them! Shoot me a text, email, or comment below. If you'd like, we could even help hold each other accountable.

While new habits are not any easier to form this time of year, and are perhaps even harder to start than usual, I always find something refreshing about the holidays and a new calendar year providing natural space for reflection on times past and what we want to prioritize going forward. Whether you do it now or anytime later this year, I hope you can take the time out to reflect on your life and how you can bring it closer to your goals.

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Photo is of paper lanterns at the Bulguksa (불국사) Temple in Gyeongju, South Korea.