My 24 for 2024 List
In recent years, I haven’t been one to do resolutions after having done many in early years and failed. This year though, I was introduced to a new concept from Gretchen Rubin’s podcast “Happier” which covers the concept of "24 for 2024" list of big and small things we want to accomplish.
This idea felt much more tangible and exciting, since it allows me to clearly outline a list of things that would make me feel like I’m living a more rich and fulfilling life. So count me in!
As part of coming up with the list, after much reflection I came up a theme for the year of re-discovery. The idea behind it is that I lost a lot of touch with things due to the pandemic, from a social perspective, wellness perspective and overall pursuit of a purposeful life. As part of my rediscovery, I’m looking to engage in activities that help me with my goals pertaining to the following themes:
Wellness: Lower on the hierarchy of needs, this area enhances my day-to-day lived experience
Creativity: A bit higher up, I’m looking for a set of things to help me express myself in my truest form
Exploration: Something that’s always awakened a sense of adventure and purpose that I want to pursue
Social: As an extrovert, the pandemic was tough, I want to concretely go after goals in this area to reawken
Giving: If you want to get, you have to give, I want to make a concerted effort here to flip life’s narrative
I thought I’d share mine (in no particular order):
ONE. 24 days skied (Wellness)
TWO. 124 Peloton rides (Wellness)
THREE. 24 books read (Exploration)
FOUR. 24 poems written (Creativity)
FIVE. 24 blogs written (Creativity)
SIX. Launch personal website (Creativity)
SEVEN. Launch a side project (Creativity)
EIGHT. 24 live performances (Exploration)
NINE. 24 outings in New York City (Exploration)
TEN. 24 charity donations (Giving)
ELEVEN. Updated financial plan (Wellness)
TWELVE. 24 projects supported (Giving)
THIRTEEN. 124 days of podcasts (Exploration)
FOURTEEN. 24 days of dancing (Creativity)
FIFTEEN. 24 evenings played (Creativity)
SIXTEEN. 24 stories written (Creativity)
SEVENTEEN. 24 pickup games (Wellness)
EIGHTEEN. 24 fires (Wellness)
NINETEEN. 24 nights away (Exploration)
TWENTY. 24 new towns visited (Exploration)
TWENTY-ONE. Birthday party (Social)
TWENTY-TWO. 24 BBQs (Social)
TWENTY-THREE. Friends weekend (Social)
TWENTY-FOUR. Send save the date (Social)
And below I go into the context of each of the items on my list to give some more context into what theme they help with, why I’m doing that particular one and how I’m planning to track each.
ONE. 24 days skied
Theme Wellness
Why? Because skiing is awesome. It’s a great way to enjoy the winter, stay active, have fun with family and friends (that are at your level), and just be outside enjoying life and the fresh mountain air and views.
How I’m tracking: Via the Slopes app! I love tracking how much vertical I do on a given day and rewatching all of the runs I did on a 3d map of the mountain. As a bonus, I also sync the activities to my Strava app to get a 360 view of all my activities.
Me enjoying skiing at Loon in New Hampshire, 2023
TWO. 124 Peloton rides
Theme Wellness
Why? Because I joined an awesome local group of guys that focus just on fitness and they decided to set up a rigorous winter program and I bought into it. We keep a good banter and now I’m deep into my second Power Zone program. The first program improved my FTP from 214 to 243, a 13.5% gain!
How I’m tracking: Via a combination of Peloton and the Strava app. I set up an integration between the two so that all my Peloton rides sync to Strava since I track other things (like skiing/Slopes) in Strava too.
My January 2024 Peloton stats
THREE. 24 books read
Theme Exploration
Why? 9 years ago, I discovered Goodreads, and marked every possible book I could remember in my life that I had read. I also marked a bunch of books I had heard about that I always wanted to read. I was disappointed when I realized that I had only read a few hundred books but had many hundreds more to go. At that rate I wouldn’t read even what I had marked to read before I would die. Now I’m on my 10th year of reading between 10-36 books per year.
How I’m tracking: Via Goodreads! Love seeing what others are reading and their reviews, setting an annual goal, and discovering new books to read.
Books I've been reading in January 2024
FOUR. 24 poems written
Theme Creativity
Why? Poetry isn’t something that I’m have a particular external goal around. The main driver for me writing my poetry is for self expression and to externalize my own thoughts and help me process my feelings and observations on the world. Writing things down helps me get it out of my head and helps make things feel more whimsical and beautiful, even the hard things.
How I’m tracking: I’ll be tracking the poems I write on my poetry page on this website for now (until it maybe gets to be too long).
Snapshot of the original poetry page of the website
FIVE. 24 blogs written
Theme Creativity
Why? I wrote up some of my thinking on why I’m going to be blogging on the website in my first blog. To reiterate, it’s really to encapsulate my thoughts and ideas for myself to look back on, and to provide insights to others that might enjoy or benefit from them. The goal is to capture unique and human perspectives, from yours truly and put those ideas out into the world.
How I’m tracking: I’ll be tracking my blogs on this website on my blog.
Snapshot of the original blog page of the website
SIX. Launch personal website
Theme Creativity
Why? Similar to the blog, I documented why I’m creating this website in my first blog as well. In addition to encapsulating my thoughts and ideas, it’s to exhibit my work for others to understand better the projects that I’ve worked on and the value and unique perspectives I can bring to others. Part of my goal is to showcase this work so that people know who they will be working with if they choose to partner on projects.
How I’m tracking: Given this one is pretty binary, if you’re reading this, it means that I’ve successfully launched the website!
Snapshot of the original home page of the website
SEVEN. Launch a side project
Theme Creativity
Why? I believe in being in invested in the company that you are working on or for. That said, life is too short to not be exploring your passions and invigorating your life so long as it doesn’t interfere with your other commitments. I have been dreaming for years about having my own product fully launched on its own. I used to tie this idea to financial independence and a boom or bust mentality. But as I’ve matured, I realize that I’m more interested in doing it for the sake of building something uniquely interesting and valuable to the world or at a minimum for myself. Whatever this initial project ends up being, it’ll certainly lead to more growth, self-discovery and purpose which I’m excited about. The main usage goal I’m looking at is to have at least one real person who legitimately values this project.
How I’m tracking: Depending on how this project manifests I could track in different ways, but my best guess at this point would be it likely ends up as an online product or website that could be tracked with a URL and is somewhat binary.
I’m using ChatGPT to help me with side projects
EIGHT. 24 live performances
Theme Exploration
Why? I want to see more of what life has to offer, and specifically get a sense of the potential of human creativity. To me, there’s nothing like a live performance to truly become inundated with the human experience and understanding human expression while connecting with others. The ways this can manifest can range from live music, to theater, to dance, to readings or to comedy. Anything where people are putting themselves out there in front of others, for the purpose of expressing human truths for others to relate to.
How I’m tracking: This one is a bit difficult given the wide range of types of live shows that I plan to be going to, many may not even have events listed publically online, or might be buried in some facebook post or page. So for this, I’m planning on Google Calendar for now. But this would be a cool product to consider building, feel free to hit me with suggestions.
Guster concert from years back
NINE. 24 outings in New York City
Theme Exploration
Why? Part of the reason I moved back to New York from the San Francisco Bay Area was to experience the world that the cultural hub of the world has to offer. With my current life commitments and the fact I live just outside the city (38-minute train ride), this can’t be a daily occurrence, so I need to make an effort to make sure I’m taking advantage of what this great city offers. The outings can certainly overlap with the live performances, but could also be just an outing in a park, or a special meal with a friend. Something that takes me out of the day-to-day and becomes something more.
How I’m tracking: It is similarly difficult to track this as live performances since these outings are defined my me and not already listed somewhere. So I’ll have to manually track these, maybe in Google Calendar and summarize somehow in a blog post later on? We shall see.
Epic dinner outing in the East Village in 2024
TEN. 24 charity donations
Theme Giving
Why? The idea of tithing was recently re-brought to my attention by the book Tough: My Journey to True Power, by Terry Crews and really helped me transform my thinking around giving. Tithing, in short, is giving away 10% of your wealth to others. My partner and I are still working out what makes sense for our family, but this frame of reference really helps exentuate the art of the possible. Historically, I haven’t done a great job of giving back to others and it continues drive personal guilt. This is the year that I plan to concretely step and and have a strategy here, some combination of money and time.
How I’m tracking: I’ll be tracking my donations through likely my money management software, which I need to figure out now that mint.com is being sunset. So TBD, but I am thinking of also researching donation management tools that might exist out there if anyone has recommendations.
We donate to the Arbor Day Foundation, for one
ELEVEN. Updated financial plan
Theme Wellness
Why? Part of overall wellness and well-being is financial wellness. As life evolves (income, expenses, etc.) you need to evolve your overall financial plan. It’s been a bit longer than I’d like and so would like to dust this off and make sure it’s aligned with where we are in life. Probably a goal I should set up to do at least annually if not more often (in addition to more frequent monthly/quarterly actions).
How I’m tracking: This will end up as a document that I likely have on Google Docs that links to a Google Sheet as well so that we can have clear alignment on how things all work with my partner.
Mint.com is going away, where to next?!
TWELVE. 24 projects supported
Theme Giving
Why? As part of my life’s work, I want to give back where I can. As part of this, I want to help others on their entrepreneurial or personal journies. The goal of this is not to try to monetize and extract value from others, but add and support others. I want to also learn more about how I can best provide my abilities back to others through this exercise. So if you are interested in help on any kind of project, please let me know and I’ll see if it aligns and do my best to help!
How I’m tracking: I’ll plan to likely track these projects in a Google Spreadsheet for now, but may move to some sort of project management software like Airtable or Asana if things get more involved. Possibly some sort of software to manage consulting engagements which I’ll need to explore.
Please contact me here if you’d like to connect
THIRTEEN. 124 days of podcasts
Theme Exploration
Why? Generally, I want to expand my horizons and learn more concepts and constantly go through self-improvement as part of learning and evolving. I’ve always loved learning: it’s less about needing to get to a finish line and being unsatisfied but rather about being in a state where growth is a central tenant. I love Podcasts like The Tim Ferriss Show and Happier with Gretchen Rubin which both focus on personal growth in many aspects in life.
How I’m tracking: I’m trying out a new app called Goodpods which is a way to track all of the episodes you’ve listened to as well as rate them. Somewhat similar to and likely modeled after Goodreads for books. Let me know if you have a recommendation though since I’m open to other options!
My Goodpods listening stats
FOURTEEN. 24 days of dancing
Theme Creativity
Why? One of my favorite quotes is from V for Vendetta, “A Revolution without dancing is a revolution not worth having” - V. Throughout my life, I’ve gotten into one of my best flow states when I’m enjoying dancing by myself or with others. I used to win contests growing up in Barclay dance class and always have enjoyed dancing at live concert and dance venues. It was through dance that I even met my partner. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found this interest fading to the back and want to intentionally add this back into my goals for the year to make space for it and see where it takes me.
How I’m tracking: Not quite sure how I’m planning to track this one yet, maybe in Strava? (jk, not taking it as an exercise play). I wonder if someone could dream up an app that would satisfy dancers somehow? I’ll maybe settle for Google Calendar or something.
Dancing at a family wedding to a live band
FIFTEEN. 24 evenings played
Theme Creativity
Why? Music has always been a thing I’ve valued in my life. Growing up, I learned piano, cello, saxophone and guitar and got to varying degrees of proficiency. That said for each, when I got to reasonable level of playing a few songs well that I liked, I moved on to the next in my quest for learning more and exploring. At this point in my life, I’d like to be able to get to a point where I have a repertoire I can pull from for piano and/or guitar to get a group of people enjoying and listening to music. This doesn’t have to be a large group, but would love to play for others in some capacity.
How I’m tracking: Again, here a lot of the playing will be a bit informal, so not sure there’s a best way to track this without super manually like with Google calendar or something. It would be nice to discover something that could help with this use case.
Jamming with friends in a basement at a party
SIXTEEN. 24 stories written
Theme Creativity
Why? Not sure if this would manifest as 24 chapters of one book (stories within a story in some sense) or 24 short stories, but overall my goal is to produce stories and content that I can reflect back on. For me, I had childhood ideas of becoming a writer at some point in my life, I always loved stories. And I love telling stories. I believe that writing these down will help me grow as a story teller, and possibly lead in directions I’m not sure. Let’s see how far down the rabbit hole I go!
How I’m tracking: I’ll be tracking this most likely through some combination of Google docs and/or this website. Looking forward to sharing these as the year goes on!
My writing notebook on a bedside table
SEVENTEEN. 24 pickup games
Theme Wellness
Why? Another area that I often enter the flow state is when I’m participating in pickup games with other people. This could be tossing the football around with a friend or niece/nephew, or it could be hopping on the bike with some friends to explore a new trail. The idea of getting together with others and playing some sort of “game” where we are being both active and in a “play” mode is great. I may narrow the scope down of this to be specifically games versus just going on rides (which could be similar to a hike or skiing). But if that ride or hike or skiing becomes some sort of competition, that could maybe qualify.
How I’m tracking: For this one, maybe I’ll try to use some sort of activity tracker if something like Strava doesn’t allow for it. Otherwise back to my default Google suite for tracking. There’s got to be something for this one, please let me know if you have ideas.
Playing pickup sports at a local field
EIGHTEEN. 24 fires
Theme Wellness
Why? This could be a social play just as much as wellness, but fires for me put me in a zen state. Concerns melt away, I’m able to open up and it takes my mind off of the busyness that often can create clutter. Whether in a fireplace at home, a fire pit in a yard, or somewhere on the beach or in nature, it drives so much satisfaction that I need to and want to make a conscious effort to do this often.
How I’m tracking: This I may need to track in some sort of simple tracking like Google Keep, but if I care enough about what day the fire was I may go again for Google Calendar.
Fire on a beach on Long Island in 2024
NINETEEN. 24 nights away
Theme Exploration
Why? Getting out of the daily rhythm and exploring is important for me to break up some of the monatny of life. Early on in life, I was inspired by figures like Indiana Jones to get out in the world and explore what’s out there. Part of this is sleeping somewhere else. I don’t necessarily have to spend a lot on this one, will try to spend the night at family and friends’ places where possible or otherwise use things like credit card points to help alleviate some of the cost here.
How I’m tracking: This one makes sense to track for sure in Google Calendar as a primary since will be tracking where I’ll actually be staying on what nights since that is something I do to just stay organized.
Airbnb in Hunter, NY where we stayed 2 nights
TWENTY. 24 new towns visited
Theme Exploration
Why? Similar to other exploration-driven goals here, I just want to get out and see more of the world out there. While others may have national parks, hikes, etc. (which I’m also interested in!) I personally really enjoy checking out downtowns and the vibes of the people, stores, coffee shops, bakeries, stores and natural surroundings. I guess I just really enjoy experiencing human culture.
How I’m tracking: I think tracking this on Google Maps might be interesting with some sort of tag to log all of the places that I visit that are net new towns this year. Would love to get any geographer / explorer’s thoughts on how to best track explorations! Would be fun to document with photos etc too. Maybe tie into the blog?
On a ferry to Block Island for the first time in 2023
TWENTY-ONE. Birthday party
Theme Social
Why? I generally have liked over the years having a birthday party as a way to gather my favorite people all together. Less so about celebrating me or anything, but just becomes a great excuse to get people together really. Since it’s the Fourth of July, usually I like doing something like a BBQ for my birthday but for the party getting out and going somewhere and doing something fun like going to sing karaoke. Maybe I should do 24 karoake nights? :D It’s been since pre-pandemic I think that I had a birthday party and I definitely think it’s missing from my life.
How I’m tracking: This one will be pretty binary, will definitely either have it or I won’t!
Birthday karaoke from years ago
TWENTY-TWO. 24 BBQs
Theme Social
Why? Keeping with the social theme, I definitely want to get people together to have BBQs in our backyard or really wherever we can BBQ. It’s my favorite way to cook and it’s nice to get into a zen state, enjoy being outside and having good company.
How I’m tracking: Likely need to track this one as well with Google Calendar for now, since likely will also invite people over for it and plan ahead. But I may likely track some more impromptu ones as well.
Epic grill session in Canmore
TWENTY-THREE. Friends weekend
Theme Social
Why? Following up graduation from high school, I would have an annual weekend where I’d get together with friends of old. This has evolved somewhat over the years based on who could make it and what the interests of the group have been and overall getting to know new people while others sometimes fall out of touch. But with the pandemic, this fell off of a cliff and we haven’t had this happen. I’m going to make this the year that this gets back on track!
How I’m tracking: This one is pretty binary. But would definitely like to come out of the weekend with a write-up of how it was with photos as well to keep for memories down the road.
Fun weekend with friends in Seattle
TWENTY-FOUR. Send save the date
Theme Social
Why? A really fun day in my life was the day that I married Josefine. Being surrounded by so many loved ones was truly special and we want to try to bring such an amazing group back together again and feel that one of the few things we can convince people to come to would be a 10-year reunion. Part of the goal here would be to pick a time and place for this and send out a save the date, we wouldn’t expect as large a group but think it’ll be awesome to see who’s able to make it!
How I’m tracking: Binary if we send this save the date out or not.
Wedding day photo from 2016
Thanks for reading this list! Hopefully it provides some inspiration for your own list or some insights into my interests. And as always, let me know if you want to discuss any of this or have a sounding board. Later!