Resolutions for 2024

A few years back, I got inspired by Daniel Mietchen for New Year’s resolutions. While inspiring and important, the way I did it was not really what I imagined, and I did not continue in 2022. Basically, I hadn’t thought through how I wanted to document it, and it all became a bit too ad hoc to feel like I was doing it with purpose.

Themes

Now I have given it quite some thought and have two new themes that I am inspired about. The themes are Wikimedians for Sustainable Development and Fediverse. To read about my ambitions in detail and see the progress overview, check this dashboard for my 2024 New Year’s Resolutions.

Documentation

I have also figured out that the way I want to document my progress is by monthly blog posts here, one for each theme. I’ll create a tag for each of them so that they all can be found easily later (fediverse 2024 and sustainability 2024).

Running

While not really a resolution as such this year, with the results from the last two years, I will keep my ambition of running 5 km every second day.

EDIT (2024-01-19): As I am also planning to do a lot more hiking this year, and that usually “eats up” running days even though it is also beneficial for general health, I will allow for those to be counted as a third of the distance. For example, a hike of 15 km would be counted as a 5 km run.

Review of 2023 goals

It’s the end of the year, and time to reflect. I didn’t have any resolutions like in 2021, but I did have some smaller ones. Or smaller might not be quite the right word, since they were ambitious. But they were more narrow.

Running

My first personal goal was to keep up with running, with the goal of averaging 2.5 km per day, or 5 km every second day to be precise. Last year, I was not sick once and kind of crushed it. But this year I was sick twice, so I lost many running days. In the end, I still racked up 882 km. That is about 2.42 km per day and a bit shy of my goal. Another way to look at it is that I managed to keep my average on more than 352 days. So not even two weeks short in total. I’ll give myself a pass on this considering the circumstances. Adding the hiking I did, I am just above 1,000 km, but that was not part of my original target.

365 climate edits

My second goal was, yet again, a Wikipedia related one. But this time it was very different and aimed to be habit building. My goal was to make one climate related edit every day, and I called it #365climateedits. This one was also hard, mainly because life is complex. I found a few kinds of edits on Wikidata that I could do even when I was short on time. But It didn’t help because, as it happened, I fell in love this year and that sometimes makes you lose track of both time and place. Still, I only missed 3 days on the full year and to make up for it, I will continue a bit into 2024. Some of my edits, but not those from Wikidata, can be seen in the hashtag tool (along with everyone else’s doing the challenge).

What I learned from this was that even though it was somewhat habit building, it was also stressful to have it hanging over me, and despite knowing that I was adding value, it never felt satisfying to do these small edits.

Therefore, my goal for 2024 will be something quite different, and if I do some challenges, I think I will be very lenient when it comes to streaks.