2018 ended not so great for my health, in my opinion. Since late 2017, I had been going to the gym daily and had a great routine going for me. Then travel for work popped up and ruined the whole thing. My routine spiraled out of control and I found myself missing workouts for a month. To make things worse, I was also eating out a lot and drinking more alcohol than I had in awhile.

That brings us to today. I’m usually not one for new years resolutions. For me, it’s mostly a time where I get annoyed that the gym is crowded. Maybe I review my finances a little more in-depth and figure out what I need to save for the year, but that’s it about it. But the end of last year was unsettling. I saw how easy it was to fall out of my routine. I’m not going to beat myself up over it, but I don’t want that to happen, especially when I have so much that I need to focus on this year between school, work, my family, and my significant other. All of that starts with being healthy. If I’m not healthy, I’m not able to focus well in my work, unable to get homework done or study for tests, or be there when my family or my partner needs me.

And “being healthy” to me doesn’t just mean going to the gym or eating better. I also want to make sure I’m improving myself in ways that aren’t just physical. So, I am here to say this is what I’m going to focus on.

Be more active
This one may sound easy, but I have two weeks of work travel built into January, which tends to derail my routines. The challenge here will be to stick with this through those travel weeks. The idea of a hotel gym is never appealing. They never have all the equipment you need for your routine, so it’s easy to just say meh and skip the workout because you can’t do what you normally would. Bullshit. Just run for 30 min, do some pushups, etc. It’s not that hard.

Eat healthier
This is another area where it’s easy to slip up while traveling for work. It’s far too easy to come back to the hotel after a long day at work and just grab a burger or something else that I shouldn’t be eating. This also carries through to when I get home as well. I’ll often lose the motivation to cook at home and eat out. It gets expensive and I pay for it in the waistline as well.

Reduce alcohol consumption
Reducing the amount of alcohol I consume goes hand-in-hand with the focus of being more active and eating healthier. You know what happens after a couple beers out with friends? We go get tacos/chips/queso, or burgers, or gyros, or some other late-night terrible food that I don’t need. And then the next day, I generally just feel like shit after I am out late drinking, which makes it harder to get to the gym or find the motivation to cook and not just eat Chipotle for three meals. This focus will be particularly challenging simply because of the role alcohol plays in my social circles. I don’t want to stop hanging out with people just because we’re going to a bar. I’ll have to be a little more creative to make this focus work.

Read more
I’m sure this is up there for a lot of people. You see people posting their reading challenges on GoodReads and they power through books all year. I tried that last year and ended up not sticking with it. So this year, I’m not limiting this to a number of books, but I’m just saying that I want to read more and actually track it. One of my colleagues keeps a public repo where she tracks what she’s reading, rating of the book, notes, etc. The interesting part is she doesn’t limit it to books. She also lists academic papers and journal articles she’s read. When I saw that, a little light went off and I thought “hey, I read academic papers for school and journal articles somewhat regularly, why am I not crediting myself for those?” So I plan track and include all the things I’m reading, not just books.

Write more
This is something I don’t do today, but would like to start. Most of my writing today is done in Slack or GitHub Issues with lots of short-form messaging to people. I’d like to do some more substantial writing and that’s why I started this blog. I often take notes on things I want to remember or clip articles into notes, but most of the time they go into Evernote or Trello to die. My hope is that if I write more about what I’m learning, doing, or whatever I dump from my brain to the page, I’ll be able to retain it more and maybe help someone else out in the process. Making that writing public will hopefully also keep me accountable *fingers crossed*

Reconnect with friends
Like most people in their early-to-mid-30s, most of my friends are married, have kids, and we rarely see each other anymore. My group of high school friends and I used to hang out every week. Now I see them all maybe once a year. I haven’t really made an effort to try and see them more, but now I want to change that. Maybe we don’t get back to seeing each other every week, but certainly we can do once a quarter.

And that’s it. The key is going to be to track these “goals”. I think they are also broad enough that if something isn’t working for me, I have the freedom to change it up and find something that does work without feeling like a failure.