A look inside my New Year's Resolutions

I hope you had a relaxing holiday period and got to spend some time with friends and family.

I went back home to Nova Scotia for two weeks, and enjoyed time with family, a few hockey games, and a lot of catching up on my reading.

I finished Essentialism and Range, both of which I enjoyed, and will upload my notes soon.

Each holidays I reflect on my past year, and I'll write a more detailed post about this next week.

That said, it's more about tweaking things than it is about setting completely new habits or goals. I do that on a monthly and quarterly basis, so I try not to put too much pressure on the start of a year.

I try to think most about two questions:

• How can I do more of the things I enjoyed most in the last year?
• How can I do less of the things that I enjoyed least, or got in the way of the things I enjoyed most?

As you can see, it's more about tweaking my current lifestyle and habits than completely overhauling them or setting crazy goals.

With that in mind, here are a few things I'll be working on this year:

• Further reducing my personal environmental impact: I'm aiming to accomplish that by offsetting my carbon footprint, committing more fully to being zero waste, and making my food consumption as local as possible.
• Consuming media more consciously: I'm aiming to add more friction to consuming video content (removing Netflix and Prime Video from my phone/tablet), make it easier to consume books (use my e-reader again, read more fiction), and triaging my Pocket queue (the app I use to read articles) weekly. I want to improve the quality/time ratio of the information I consume.
• Creating more space: There are many things I want to learn and do, but I'm learning that I can only go deep on so many things at once. With that in mind, I'll be making an effort to decide not to do things, and make more space for those that are top priority.

What are your New Year's resolutions? What are you trying to improve? Reply to this email, I'd love to hear from you!

With that in mind, here's a reflection-themed newsletter.

Product I'm Using:Wren
One of my focuses for this year is improving (ie. reducing) my environmental impact. A key component of that is becoming carbon neutral, and I've subscribed to Wren, where I make a monthly donation based on their estimate of my carbon footprint. Whether they are pricing carbon appropriately is worthy of a more in-depth post, but I prefer acting and then figuring that out later. Worthy initiatives to support regardless.
Articles I'm Reading:

• What Will Happen In The 2020s - Fred Wilson - I am skeptical of almost all predictions, and you should be too; these are meant to spur thinking about the upcoming decade. What do you believe will happen?
• How to Develop Better Habits in 2020 - Ryan Holiday - A very useful piece for those of you trying to develop new habits, or improve old ones.
• The Best of Farnam Street 2019 - I'm a big fan of Farnam Street, and here's a shortened list of their best articles from 2019. Supplement with their best podcast episodes of 2019.
• Why Do We Work So Hard? - The Economist - As you set about planning your New Year, a thought-provoking piece on the role of work in our lives.
• The Best Way to Consume Information - Nick Maggiulli - Some thoughts about how to choose which, and which types, of information you consume.
• Vegans vs omnivores - Meg McGowan - A thoughtful piece about the argument for and against becoming vegan.
• Ponzi Schemes, Private Yachts, and a Missing $250M in Crypto: The Strange Tale of Quadriga - Vanity Fair - I finally got around to reading this over the break, and what a story it is. Funnily enough, Quadriga had strong ties to Nova Scotia (my home province), which makes it even more interesting. Scam or screwup? My money is on scam (literally - I had a very small amount of money in Quadriga).

Have a great week!

Graham