How My 2024 Went and What I’ve Got Planned for 2025

My favorite post of the year! After reviewing what I’ve written a year ago, I am actually surprised at how different everything has been this time around. That’s why these posts make so much sense and I recommend doing something similar to everyone. It doesn’t have to be published on a blog like I do, but just writing it down to sort out your thinking about what has happened and what you’d like to change helps put things into perspective.

During 2023, I have made some big picture contemplations regarding the future of humankind. I have stated that I don’t think the climate crisis can still be averted and that we should see if a focus on something else entirely could somehow save humankind, because I believe it’s worth saving. In the mean time, I have not nudged away from these positions, but it has been interesting for me to see that apparently I had the time and brain space to even think about these things. I did not have that luxury during 2024.

It has been a much harder year for me, but also a year in which I achieved many things of which I’m proud.

My focus this year was on family.

Successes here are very hard to measure, especially since it’s just so demanding in the day-to-day. After selling my two remaining companies at the end of 2023, my wife doubled her weekly working hours as a doctor at the beginning of March and just this December achieved what she set out to.

Next year will be different again, fortunately, but 2024 has to be digested first. I became a stay-at-home husband and had to grapple with the challenges that arose from that. My four kids are great and each morning I look forward to waking them up with a cuddle, but the days managing their many tasks and emotions as well as the chaos they leave behind just by existing are so long sometimes.

I also learned that the public opinion on men who stay at home to care for kids and a household is very low. On so many occasions I had to listen to deprecating or insulting comments about my choice. It’s easy to suggest that just ignoring it all would solve it, but in fact the more often you hear something, the deeper it moves into you and the harder it becomes to just shrug it off. My sense of self-worth did definitely suffer. It’s hard to avoid this turning into a downward spiral. The workload, the responsibilities, the pressure, and the sinking self-esteem all played together and pushed me further down as the year went on.

During July and August, I reached a low point. I won’t go into much detail here, but there was a trigger moment I didn’t expect to have that effect on me at all. In retrospect those summer weeks were quite possibly the lowest I’ve felt in the past decade, from a mental health point of view.

Mostly thanks to sports, I made it through and slowly recovered. It is still hard for me to deal with that specific triggering situation, because it remains looming over me in a way, but my routines and the smiles of my kids help me get through it. I’m thankful for each day I get to spend that I’m not feeling as much pressure as I did back in summer, because I don’t know how long it’s going to be until it comes back.

Recently, I heard from a friend that an old friend of his whom I also knew unexpectedly had died from skin cancer earlier this year. He didn’t do anything wrong, just got unlucky. At 39 years old, he left a wife and two kids. I was shocked. The only positive outcome of situations like these is that it makes you appreciate each day you get to live through some more and puts current problems into a different framing. I’m so glad I get to have these days at all, however bad they may be.

I’m sharing all of this here because I would like to play my part in normalizing talking about it.

Some might be surprised to read this. To the outside, when not talking one on one with close friends, I don’t project the internal struggle I sometimes have. And I think that’s a good reminder that you can never know the things going on in other people. The burdens they carry. Sometimes when I interact with others whom I don’t know that well and feel like a certain response from them leaves open some questions, I think about that.

I can’t know what they’re going through right now. In these situations, kindness and patience need to be valued more.

This has been a somber introduction into this review, but it’s going to get better now. I’m surely not here to pull you readers down, it’s quite the contrary. The lesson is that a few bad months can always occur but we can make it through if we find out what is required for that. For me, apart from my kids and my wife’s and friends’ support, that’s sports. Those never fail to pull me up again. A good long run, or a shorter hard one, a bike ride, a marathon race in different surroundings, whatever it is, I feel so much better afterwards. The hours I’ve put into it are returned to me ten-fold in many different ways.

Over the years, this has continually enhanced my performance. That hasn’t been the number one goal, but all the achievements I’ve made this year certainly add to the mountain of positivity I’ve gathered.

My Three Big Goals of 2024: ✅, ✅, and ✅

📚🏃 #1: 20 Books, 20 Marathons

I’ve done several versions of this over many years, and this year went for the number 20 each and landed at those exact numbers. In regards to reading, I was all over the place this year. A lot of Harry Potter, some non-fiction, some self-help, some works on societal challenges, even an esoteric book was among them. It was spread out over the whole year, no long breaks. In total, I’ve read 7,244 pages over those 20 books, meaning 362 per book on average, which is down from 9,212 pages in 2023. Those numbers are just for fun, though, I don’t value the metrics. I set the annual target so I don’t forget that reading books is an activity that’s beneficial to me in several regards.

My favorite three books of 2024

1. Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman
2. Useful Not True by Derek Sivers
3. A Therapeutic Journey by Alain de Botton

The 20 marathons were a bit more randomly distributed over the year, and after I had finished my 20th one on October 20th, I didn’t feel like doing any more of them until the end of the year. I was actually marathon-saturated, which felt new to me. A few months of a marathon break are good for recovery and I’m very happy how much of a benefit that has given me in terms of power and speed gains I’m currently experiencing.

My favorite three marathons of 2024

Yeah, sorry, can’t do it. There are at least 10 of the 20 which need to go on this list because the variety of them was just huge. No way to make a choice here. See the full list with links to them here. My marathon year of 2024 was just 💯, I couldn’t even imagine how to top that.

🏃💨 #2: Sub-3 Marathon

After four years of focused work towards it and quite a few failures along the way, 2024 was the year when I finally broke that barrier. And then, a few weeks later, I broke it for another time! A huge milestone for me that made me immensely happy. Both those races were so special and memorable to me, I published big blog posts about them.

My first Sub-3 Marathon (2:58:44) at Bienwald in Kandel (Southern Germany) blog post focussed on the training that got me there and what others can maybe learn from that success.

The second Sub-3 Marathon (2:59:19) happened on home turf in Hamburg and was more like a celebration of that newly reached level. Like a victory lap.

✅✅ Double-check!

🏔️ #3: Western States 100 Qualifier, Zugspitz Ultratrail

The journey is the destination here. It takes around ten years of annual qualifier racing to finally get drawn at the Western States lottery, one of my bucket list goals. The races you have to do in order to be thrown into the lottery are tough. I’ve made a new sub-page at teesche.com/wser to explain the rules and show my progress.

I went into this only qualifier race on German grounds with lots of respect. It’s one of the harder ones because of the elevation and alpine terrain. But with proper training and the right attitude I surpassed my own estimates and finished this 106 kilometer race with around 5,400 meters of elevation gain strongly within the first third of males after almost exactly 19 hours. For you imperialist people, that’s 65 miles with 17,700 feet of gain.

The experience spun off a long blog post with amazing pictures I’m quite proud of, too.

Super happy about that. I did what I could and checked off that goal.

But a good finish doesn’t help at the lottery, it’s only the fact that you finished within the set time limit that counts. So, with a theoretical chance of just 1.7% I expectedly lost at the drawing, now for the third time. You can guess what goal I’ve set for 2025!

🕺 Three Additional Fun Goals of 2024: Mixed Results

🇩🇪 #1: A Marathon Race in All 16 Federal States of Germany 📈

I added the states of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Saarland, and Sachsen-Anhalt, bringing my count up to 15, missing only Brandenburg. That state is a tough one because there’s not much of a running scene and only one proper race I know of – Spreewald Marathon. And that one collides with my favorite Hamburg Marathon almost every year. One day!

🚅 #2: Sub-3 on 1,000 Meters ❌

Getting below 3:00 minutes on 1,000 meters is tougher than it sounds like. Currently, I can hold that insane pace for only 20-30 seconds. It’s 20 km/h or 12.4 mph. This needs more focus than I previously estimated.

📝 #3: Finish Writing my Beginner’s Marathon Guide ❌

Some good progress, but since it’s more of a bonus task for me, I didn’t prioritize it this year. This annoys me, because I think a lot of people would like to read it and could profit from it. Which is why I have booked a London workation week in January with the plan to focus on finishing it.

🪣 Bucket List Progress

There’s a dedicated Bucket List page on this website at /future. Those are the things I would like to do at some point before I die, but not necessarily within the current year.

In addition to adding three federal states to my bucket list item of completing marathons in all 16 German states, I finished another one of the World Marathon Majors, Chicago. It’s been so great running in this amazing city! Although I wouldn’t personally put it on the same level as Boston or New York City, I had a blast and was very happy I made the long trip there. I think the blog post turned out quite interesting, too.

The World Marathon Majors have just increased their number from 6 to 7, now including Sydney, Australia. Which means in 2024 I moved up my progress from 4/6 to 5/7, a slight mathematical improvement. To give you a better overview, I’ve made a new sub-page at teesche.com/majors to show my status and explain.

The next big item crossed off on my bucket list has been to finish a marathon in less than three hours, which I’ve done twice, as mentioned.

In addition to those big goals I’ve also ticked off two fun small ones this year. Those are trying water-only fasting for 24 hours, as well as learning how to juggle with three balls. On both of those I’ve published a blog post explaining the experiences.

🤩 Sports-Wise, the Year Couldn’t Have Been Any Better

I really had so much fun with all the different things I did. All the trips, the fun challenges, and last not least spending so much time running with friends. Especially since it was a challenging year in other respects, running has really gotten me through it.

Another little source of positivity for me has been the complete rewrite and optimization I’ve done on my old little web tool, Speechbox. I’ve published a blog post on how that looked like in detail back in April. Since then, it has been a pleasure to once again interact with the growing number of paying subscribers and code some new features from time to time. I don’t earn nearly enough to call this a job yet, but the income generated from it covers all the different monthly subscriptions I myself use, so I tell myself it’s worth it 😄.

I have already linked to many of my own favorite posts of this year, such as the one detailing my successful training routine for the Sub-3 Marathon, which by the way has become by far the most clicked on this page. Turns out many people would like to know how this works! I’m particularly proud of the Zugspitz Ultratrial post, the one about Chicago Marathon 2024, but I also think that these three posts turned out pretty well:

• 🪧 The first time I was an official marathon pacer helping people achieve their set goal times at a race, Flensburg Marathon
• 🔁 Streak running: I ran on every single day for 1,000 consecutive days and detailed the challenges and insights from it
• 🚭 How I successfully quit smoking back in 2015

🏫 Talking About Running at a School

This year in March as well as in November, I had the honor to again get invited by CJD Gymnasium Braunschweig, a private school for gifted kids, to give talks about the positive effects of a lifestyle that heavily focuses on running and physical fitness in general. The teacher whose initiative it was to invite me, Karina Fäsche, had met me through Strava and shares my love for sports.

Her intensive philosophy classes for students in grades 12 and 13, right before finishing school, are often stacked with incredibly smart kids and it’s a blessing to be able to spend time with them when I go there. The questions they ask are so smart! And it always feels amazing to open up these promising minds to the world of ultra running in particular. They enjoy my stories about those 100k races in the mountains, sometimes with open mouths. It broadens their horizons and shows them what’s possible.

When I tell them that I do all these things while being vegetarian and mostly vegan, it often starts a conversation on the topic of nutrition as well. I can share a lot of knowledge in that regard which unfortunately isn’t part of the German curriculum yet. Many of the questions they have for me afterwards are on the topic of that, so you can see the eagerness to learn is there.

We have made it a tradition to do a 21.1k “Ringgleis” loop after the talks, which a few teachers and students often join.

Naturally, every year there’s a new group of students about to have their final exams at that school, so I have been invited back. I hope this can continue far into the future as I refine my talk from year to year. Maybe some other schools will show interest in this as well. Since I charge no money for it and save the teachers from having to prepare anything for that one class, I think it’s quite a good deal! 😉

The comments I’ve gotten from the students speak a clear language, too.

• “Tim shows me what great time management he has, that he knows his priorities so well and acts accordingly. You can take him as a role model!”
• “He has absolutely no fear of pain – amazing!”
• “I wonder where he gets the perseverance from.”
• “I’ve now also decided to read more again.”
• “For me, there was a lot in there that you can also set as a goal, like moving significantly more.”

🗺️ Taking it Back to the Streets

Another thing that has given me massive amounts of joy this year is a project called #EverySingleStreet.

I’m sure it’s not much of a stretch for you to guess what’s that about. Yep, running all the streets. Obviously it makes sense to set some reasonable goal or milestone here, although you don’t have to. For me that’s my hometown of Hamburg. At the time of writing, this city of nearly two million residents has 8,125 named streets over a sum of 4,155 kilometers or 2,581 miles. It’s a lot and will take years, but it’s definitely within reach.

As with many of the projects and goals I’ve set, the key inspiration here came from my friend Michael. He’s currently in second place in Hamburg with just over half of the streets done, while I just started to take this seriously in September of 2024. A key element you need is a GPS watch with proper navigational features such as full maps. I only got one in September, the magnificent COROS PACE Pro. Since then the gates were opened for me to also join in. Shout-out also to my friend Patrick, who occasionally does this and has taken me on a few street collecting runs earlier this year.

The past years of running around rather aimlessly have already led me to complete around 700 streets before I even took up the project. Now, with route planning and even a few train rides to complete neighborhoods further away from home, I’ve made a jump from placing 38th to 16th in Hamburg, now standing at over 1,500 streets.

I like this a lot and have learned many different things about my city already. I’m surely going to write a separate blog post some time next year about all of it. The weirdest thing is that Hamburg now simultaneously feels a lot smaller and a lot bigger to me.

The next year will surely see me check off some more streets in my city.

And with that, we’ll move towards the future!

🔮 What I’ve Got Planned for 2025

As with previous years, settling on three big goals in the athletic area for a year seems to be the sweet spot number for me.

3️⃣ The Big Three

📚🏃 #1: 12 Books, 12 Marathons

This is my consistent basis for everything. I’m going down from 20 each to 12, one for each month. The reason isn’t that 20 felt like too much for me to have a benefit on me, it’s mainly that I would like to emphasize quality over quantity this year. A lower number gives me more time to recover between races and also more time to read longer books. I still feel like setting the target helps me keep at it, but I view it more like it’s giving me a sense of direction instead of it being a hard goal to reach.

⛰️ #2: Finishing a Western States Qualifier Race

Entering the annual lottery drawing is still a thing since I haven’t been lucky in December 2024 with my odds of 1.7 percent. It’s more the journey than the destination here that counts for me, which is why I might even do two of the races in 2025, depending on –again– some lottery luck.

The one fixed race I’ll do is called Tuscany Crossing, in Italy. It’ll be just over 100 kilometers long and will feature 3,600 meters of gain, significantly less than the races I did the years before. I’m looking forward to giving it my best shot on April 12th. I would like to run this as well as I can and not just finish it before the allotted cut-off time. Really looking forward to it.

The second race which is not yet set in stone for me is the legendary CCC, part of the UTMB week in Chamonix, France. This “little sister race” of the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc around the Montblanc massive is also a bit over 100 kilometers long, but it’s on alpine terrain and over 6,000 meters of elevation gain will be a much harder challenge at the end of August – provided I’m lucky enough to get a spot with my qualification of currently 7 so-called “Running Stones”.

With more than four months between both races, I think it will be possible to do those properly.

🚅 #3: A New Marathon PR & Boston Qualification

While we were in Chicago this October, my friend Nico put the thought into my brain that an even faster marathon should be well within reach for me if I put some focus on it. His point was that not just I but everyone in our bracket of people of around forty years of age would be able to reach at least a 2:45 hour marathon if taking it seriously. First, I was shocked by that outrageous suggestion and vehemently argued against that.

But then, I gave it more thought. What if Nico is right?

What if we all have that in us and just build up this mental wall with excuses that actually wouldn’t hold up in reality? What if Kipchoge’s phrase of “No Human is Limited” is actually not just a marketing gag? What’s the smartest way to think about this?

I choose to believe.

After my two successful Sub-3 races I had shelved the topic at first, but especially the suggestion to once again make it to Boston lit a fire in me. How cool would that be! The qualification standards have become harder since I last got in and so in order to qualify for 2026 I would need to run well under three hours and not just a comfy 3:10h. It’s hard to say what’s necessary this time because the cut-off is set according to the number of people who make it under the hard cut, sorted by fastest first. My estimate, extrapolating from the years before, is that I will probably need to do a 2:55h in order to have a solid chance.

Nico suggested to try and go for the maximum possible personal record, though. I thought about it. A progression of around 5% per year is considered not to jeopardize the body too much. If I subtract that from my current personal best of 2:58:44 hours, I land at 2:49:47 hours. Below 2:50h, that sounded intriguing! Then I did some more maths (with my friend ChatGPT) and found out that this would mean an average pace of 4:01 minutes per kilometer. Why not go for 4:00 flat, was obviously my first reaction to that. So here we are, that’s my goal.

Running a marathon at an average pace of 4:00 minutes per kilometer.

If your goals don’t scare you, they’re not big enough!

I’m again going to Bienwald Marathon, this time held on March 9th, because it offers the perfect conditions for breaking a personal best. If the weather plays nicely and my current training goes well, I don’t see why I shouldn’t succeed.

So far, the training is as challenging as it is promising and I have gained a lot of speed in just a few weeks, surpassing even my own expectations. 

Just in case something goes wrong immediately before or during the race I have booked the flat and fast Barcelona Marathon for the weekend after as a Plan B. Either way it will be great to go to Spain and experience that race, too – as a serious second PR attempt or a victory lap.

Those are my big main goals for 2025.

🕺 The Additional Fun Goals

The status of 15/16 federal German states marathons will probably stay at that for the upcoming year. Maybe in 2026 I’ll get lucky with the timing, but there’s naturally no rush.

I’ve realized how much harder running a single kilometer in less than three minutes is that I’m now convinced it requires real focus and bunch of weeks of specific training for it. I won’t be able to just do this in addition to everything else. It’ll still be on my mind and I might give it a try, but it moved down a few spots on my priority list.

My marathon running starter’s guide will hopefully make huge progress during my upcoming specific writing workation in London this January, and I would be surprised if it were to take more than a couple months after that until the finished book appeared here on the website as a free download.

🌏 Completing the World Marathon Majors

Now standing at five completed races, I would like to do the remaining ones as well. I had such a great time at the five. Doing Berlin another time is also on my list, I would love that. Unfortunately, I lost at the Tokyo Marathon lottery for 2025, as well as the Berlin one a few weeks ago. The new race in the Major group is Sydney, Australia. A long journey, of course. I nevertheless put my name into the hat and will see those lottery results sometime in January. Maybe it will be another highlight for 2025, going to Downunder in August.

Life is short, I’m trying to make most of it.

Just adding a tiny side note here, I’ve also put a new bucket list item onto the list, and that’s finishing a long distance triathlon in less than ten hours! As with the fast marathons, I caught the bug after a bit of a break from it. The trip to Roth this previous summer helped a lot and now my friend and training buddy Mathias and I have secured the tickets to go to Roth another time. We’re using the planned deferral method to race in 2026, not 2025. This upcoming year is already full with conflicting events. I’m really looking forward to doing that epic race once more after a then nearly ten year long break. Stepping up my cycling game will be a big priority to reach that time goal, but that’s a challenge I’m looking forward to.

📋 The Daily Habits

In the middle of 2022 I began building my own habit tracking tool. It started with saving a daily picture of myself and some simple input for logging my current mood at several points during the day.

Through the Apple Health functionality, I later set up an automatic synchronization of some metrics to my database, such as my daily step count, my weight which I measure most mornings with a WiFi connected scale, and the time I am asleep per night tracked with an app. My mobile screen time and the time I spent at my desktop computer using apps in what I defined as the productive category also made it into the log book, via Apple’s ScreenTime feature and the RescueTime app, respectively.

My location and the current weather were next. Apart from these mostly automatically tracked metrics, I added some manual ones, too. And those were my set daily habits.

Up until the end of 2022, I had all of it dialed in nicely so I was able to track the full year of 2023 and all I did during it, habit-wise. The list of habits had grown quite a bit and on many days I successfully checked off most of them, if not all. You can see a good overview in my 2023/2024 blog post. I kept it going into 2024, but when that year turned out to be a lot more difficult than I had thought, culminating in the mentioned situation of critical overwhelm I found myself in at the end of July, I saw no other way than to rethink the manually tracked daily habits.

Do they actually serve me and my well-being, most importantly on the mental side of things?

Or do some of those create a sense of pressure in me, which is currently too much for me to handle?

The answer became clear quite quickly. I stopped the manual tracking and scaled the number of habits down to a minimum so I could make it through the year in one piece. Here’s the list. It looks like a failure but to me it is a success because removing them helped me navigate through it. Adding variations of some of them back into my life is currently under way, but I’m deliberately taking it slowly.

❌ Wim Hof Breathing

The routine is still great and helps me reset myself. It also requires 13 minutes of absolute quiet around you at some point during the day and your own mind to settle down and focus fully on it. It might sound hard to believe, but even that short amount of time of free brain space was nowhere to be found for me during those awful weeks. After quitting the daily habit, I have done it a handful of times when I felt the need for it.

❌ Core Strength Exercises

Similarly, for a proper strength training session, you need a bit of undisturbed time and mental focus. Additionally, this has never been fun to me, it’s only a means to an end: becoming a better runner. It felt good to notice my body change for the better and feel more stable at higher speeds over the months, though. Currently, I’m doing 2-3 strength sessions per week, but only because I’m in the middle of a training block and the mental space is there. I’m grateful for that.

❌ Fully Plant-Based Days

I took this quite seriously and tried to maximize the number of days on which I went fully plant-based. On more than half of the days, I succeeded. And while the ethical and environmental arguments are still correct and highly valued, I become increasingly unsure if the nutritional argument is best, too. Looking closely at what you eat is definitely smart and the value of some animal products can’t be denied. It’s also very important to me what I feed my kids, and it’s a fact that the still unusual vegan diet is tough to get perfectly right for kids, from a nutritional aspect. Especially if you’ve got four kids with differing tastes. So my main reason to move away and go back to vegetarianism (with some fish) is practicality.

❌ Mobile Screen Time under 60 Minutes

I’ll be honest, I enjoy the escapism that the occasional doom scrolling offers. It’s clear it’s bad but it feels good in the moment. The dopamine hit you get with a slightly interesting post on social media sometimes just hits the spot and takes you out of dire thought patterns. So I decided to not be as hard on myself with the limits as I used to, in order to cope with the tough situations at times. I have a general feeling of guilt that I’m on the phone too much, but tackling that problem will have to wait a little longer. This is probably the habit I’m most likely to reinstate, though.

❌ Bedtime Before 21:30

Getting enough sleep is clearly the base for everything. Going back to that summer phase, sleep just wasn’t an option for too many days. And not being able to hit that goal was an additional drain on my state of mind. Since the situation has stabilized, I often hit that goal of being in bed at half past nine just naturally. On those especially draining days I sometimes collapse in bed even earlier, reminding myself how great that is for my body and mind.

❌ Avoiding Alcohol Strictly

As with screen time and and a late bedtime, the bad impact alcohol has on our bodies is well documented. Mostly, it’s a cost/benefit analysis here. While the cost didn’t seem that large for a long time, the benefit of having a fun evening with friends easily outweighed it. This has shifted for me, and especially since I’m taking running more seriously the negative impact that alcohol has on that has become more noticeable. That being said, under special circumstances, with special people and very special drinks, I have decided to sometimes make an excuse from the rule. This has happened probably once quarterly and I’m okay with that.

❌ Not Buying Unnecessary Stuff

I feel like tracking this on a daily basis for over a year has helped me enough to ingrain it into my behavior. Now that I’ve stopped tracking it, I still haven’t become a shopaholic. I started tracking it because I felt like I was buying too much random stuff on Amazon which added just marginal value to my life and wanted to reduce that. That reduction happened and my current level of spending is fine, so I feel like it’s been a success.

📝 The Daily Habits That Stayed

The list is very short now and that feels good. The most important thing to me is my daily run. It’s the one thing I can do each day that never feels like a nuisance and always lifts my mood. I am so glad I have running. It’s a true gift.

My love of running has increased over the years and that trend hasn’t stopped in 2024. I’m excited to see where this will lead. For now, I couldn’t be any happier with having found this hobby which has no downsides. Finding new ways to add variation, such as the #EverySingleStreet project, make it even better than it already is. The beautiful mountain races, the trips to the odd city marathon, the slow buddy runs, the tough training blocks, I love it all.

That’s probably also the reason that I broke 5,000 kilometers in 2024 for the first time ever. That’s 13.6 per day on average. 3,106 miles and 8.5 miles per day. Just a few years back that would have been an unbelievable number to me.

The only other two things I do every day are taking a photo to visualize my own gradual decline over the years and solve the NYT Wordle game each morning during coffee to get the aging brain going.

I still track all the automatic stuff such as daily steps, sleep, weight, location, and weather, and this year added the Cost per Zwift measure, calculating how much each virtual stationary bike ride has cost me on the basis of the monthly subscription fee. The number is a real kick in the butt to hop onto the bike more often!

🎯 The General Direction for 2025, or My Theme

I like the Yearly Theme approach popularized by CGP Grey and Myke Hurley and have used it in the past a few times. Contemplating this has had a positive effect on me. I thought about what topical umbrella I’d like to put over the next year but wasn’t too sure. Much about my life has stabilized and in general I’m pretty happy with how things are going. The year 2024 in retrospect was probably something like 💁 The Year of Service for me, because it mostly revolved around taking care of others. Next year will have lots of emphasis on that as well, but I will also put some more thought into what future work occupations I could follow up on.

In this past fall I published a blog post on that topic called “Project System Elephant” and the search for ideas is still on my mind. It’s not a pressing issue still, fortunately, but I still feel an urge to make progress in that area of finding a new professional path to follow. The 🔍 Year of Search could be a good theme.

A different option for me that feels good and in tune with what I’ve done with the daily habits this summer would be 🧘 Year of Simplicity. Removing more of those bits in my life which have started to feel like extra weight to carry around would be nice.

Maybe that’s the key here. Putting three together to form a Super Theme™! It’s a good alliteration, too.

💁🔍🧘 To 2025, the Year of Service, Search, and Simplicity!

Cheers my friends – I hope you’ll have a great new year.