I just published the last quarter follow up of the year, and together with the Q1, Q2 and Q3 it’s time to reflect on the entire year as a whole. When the year started I was really inspired by the idea of writing down my goals like this and perhaps even got a bit carried away in my planning. However, as the year passed it got more and more obvious to me that this felt like a great way to organize work, but not a pleasant way to feel inspired on my spare time.
This should have been obvious to me since I already know myself to be really lust driven in my creative projects. Usually it is more about seizing the opportunity and ride along with the the flow than forcing myself along a path. So this gives my some ideas for how to go about 2026. But before we go there, let’s try to make an overview.
| Q1 | Q2 | Q3 | Q4 | |
| Sustainability | ||||
| Wikimedians for sustainable development | 🟢 | 🔴 | 🔴 | 🟡 |
| Office of Carbon Omission | 🟡 | 🔴 | 🟡 | 🔴 |
| Openness advocacy | ||||
| Open By Default | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🟢 |
| Govdirectory | 🟢 | 🟡 | 🔴 | 🔴 |
| Wikipediapodden | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🟡 | 🟡 |
| Book project | 🟡 | 🟡 | 🟡 | 🔴 |
| Learning | ||||
| German | 🔴 | 🟢 | 🔴 | 🟡 |
| Climate change | 🟢 | 🔴 | – | – |
| AI | – | 🔴 | – | 🟢 |
| Health | ||||
| Running and hiking | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🟢 |
| Eating | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🟢 | 🟢 |
The table shows it more clearly that the first half of the year went slightly better, and that some goals were better suited for me than others. For more details, see each quarterly review, linked above. My two main takeaways are these:
- I need fewer goals to make it easier for myself, and
- I need less detailed goals to make it possible to find inspiration within a theme rather than having a huge to-do list hanging over me.
When it comes to what I had in my goals, I am rather pleased with my themes even though I had such variation in my successes. All of the things above are things that I somehow feel are important, even though I must say that the more I learned about AI this year, and especially how it is being deployed, the more I felt it important to learn about from a defensive/advocacy perspective rather than using it as a tool.
So even if I care deeply about them, the sheer number made it more of a burden than something joyful to strive for. I don’t think I will give up on anything of the themes as such, but I will more carefully think about how I approach them. These are my overarching thoughts going into 2026, which is coming up next.
[…] many previous years, I have some sort of resolutions for 2026. Learning from my over ambition last year, I will do it very differently on some parts this year. But let’s start with something I will […]