I’ve been reading The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg, recently. You might know it by its bright yellow cover. I’m about halfway through, but as usual when I get into one of these books (Atomic Habits by James Clear being the other one), it makes me start to think about my own habits and goals for the future.
For the last few years, I’ve been writing New Year’s resolutions. Most times, I don’t ever revisit them after I write them. They’re usually not too thought out to begin with and are usually generic (such as “exercise more”: a regular on the resolution list).
However, this year, I decided to actually re-read my 2024 goals first and think about my progress towards them before writing new ones for next year.
I’ll go through my 2024 goals and my 2025 goals, and wrap it up with my thoughts on how this relates to this website and my goals for this place and its content going forward.
So here are my 2024 goals and how I rated myself.
2024 Goals
Get in shape
Rating: 3/5 – Room for improvement and measurement.
Positives
- I signed up for a gym membership on December 1st, and was consistent in going for the first two weeks while I was in town.
- I made specific workout routines that I can repeat every time so I don’t have to make it up on the fly – this had been a big challenge and mental block in the past, and made it hard to measure my progress because I was doing something slightly different every time.
- I run ~ 2 times per week.
- I play soccer every Wednesday night.
Areas of improvement
- I’m inconsistent with my running schedule.
- I don’t have the diet to go with it. Namely I:
- Don’t choose enough healthy options
- Don’t consume enough calories and protein
- Have reduced my alcohol, but still make many exceptions and probably average out to a drink or two per week
Be present
Rating: 1/5
Positives
- I am occasionally intentional about putting my phone down when someone is talking to me.
Areas of Improvement
- Still fairly glued to my phone
- Sometimes my head is somewhere else when someone is talking to me, especially while working or driving.
- Can struggle to destress in a busy/crowded environment (e.g. cooking for others, or hosting… focusing so much on the task or on keeping an eye on the dog that I forget to enjoy myself and listen to others.)
Foster relationships
Rating – 2/5
Positives
- Deepening new friendships in Baltimore
- Inviting people to things, accepting invites of others
- Texting closest long-distance friends monthly/bimonthly
Areas of Improvement
- Meaningful check-ins with friends in person
- Deliberate scheduling of visits or planning for people to come to visit me
- When something makes me think of someone, I should text them about it. The key is to act on it immediately before it slips my mind. I regularly say “oh, I should do that later” then hours or days go by before I remind myself of it again.
Be a good listener
Rating – 1/5 – Similar to Be Present
Positives
- Clearly communicating when I’m not listening or need to finish something to be able to listen properly
- Putting my phone down or turning away from my computer
Areas of Improvement
- Still get distracted by my phone, put more importance on some article I’m reading or other nonsense than the people in front of me
- Still forget little details or things that have been said many times (likely because I’m on my phone/not present)
- Still think about work in my head while listening/thinking about something else at the same time
- Ask people more questions about themselves and listen to the answer fully
Others
These were also on my 2024 goals list, though I feel I made much less progress or conscious effort towards them than the above categories.
- mental health
- reduce screen time
- get outdoors
- meditation/mindfulness
- hobbies
- community engagement/volunteering
- de-stressing
2025 Goals
In 2025, I’m trying to organize my goals around themes and tangible start and end points (this is easier said than done and very much still a work in progress). Each theme can have one ore more goals attached to it, and each goal can also cover one or more themes, but usually there is a primary theme and secondary theme. The benefit of this is that my goals can help each other and work together, as you’ll see below.
My themes are:
- Healthy eating
- Wise usage of free time
- Thriftiness
- Exercise
- Mental focus and clarity
- Fulfilling relationships with friends and family
- Giving more than I get in life, relationships, friendships, and community
Some of these are lofty, which is why they have more approachable goals underneath them.
Here are a few of my goals.
Exercise
Gain 10 lbs. of muscle
This one is pretty straightforward and measurable. I’m starting at 145 pounds and hoping to get to 155 pounds by following a consistent and deliberate routine. I’m also hoping that this will be a “keystone habit” for me, as its referred to in The Power of Habit, and spillover into other goals and aspects of my life (mainly Healthy Eating and Mental Focus and Clarity themes).
Wise usage of free time
Cut out passive screen time
I have a lot of screen time. I have 8 hours of work screen time, 3-4 hours of phone screen time (according to Apple), and probably another 1 to 2 or upwards of 3 to 4 hours of TV screen time, depending on the night (some of these hours do overlap, mainly phone + TV time). This is basically every waking hour of my day, unfortunately.
Aside from the strain on my eyes, my chief concern with this trend is what comes with my screen time: sitting and usually accomplishing nothing. Sitting being terrible for my health, and accomplishing nothing being a poor use of my time.
Work screen time is mostly inevitable (I can probably take some more calls on my phone on a walk, but not many), so I will focus on cutting down what I call passive screen time: scrolling aimlessly or consuming mindlessly. I already have a few ideas.
Another of my goals is to host friends more often. To host friends more often, I need to cook, which means I need to plan and try recipes ahead of time. Sunday night seems like a great time to do this. I usually sit on the couch and watch Sunday Night Football, which is great fun but a complete waste of time unless the Eagles are playing, as much as I enjoy Tirico and Collinsworth. So instead, I’ve decided that I can throw the game on in the background but will use that time in the kitchen to plan and try a recipe for the week. So now I’m making progress towards two goals at once.
Here are my other goals:
- Be 100% sober
- Donate unused items to shelters and goodwill
- Eat enough protein to build muscle
- Get 8+ hours of sleep per night
- Improve memory of conversations, plans, and events
- Read every week
- Spend less time sitting
I’m still working on goals for my Give more than I get… theme. If you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them.
You’ll also notice I don’t have a writing goal or career goals here yet. Those are also things I’m still thinking about. All I know with my writing is that when I do it, I really enjoy it, and I really like the idea of doing it much more regularly. However, finding the time and the willpower, as well as the content to write about, has been the stumbling block for me.
Another thing that Duhigg mentions about habit research is the importance of two things: cues and preparing for adversity.
Cues
Cues are things that trigger a habit. It’s essential to have these to help kick off an action. If you have a bad habit, you might keep the same cue and replace the bad habit with the new habit. For a net-new habit, you might need a net-new cue too.
I already mentioned my Sunday Night Football cue. Some others I’m considering are:
| Cue | Action |
|---|---|
| when the Eagles game is about to start | go on a run and listen to the first quarter on the Merrill Reese and Mike Quick radio broadcast (this is a win-win since I love listening to the radio broadcast sometimes). |
| 7:00 AM on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays | Go to the gym |
| Getting home from the gym | Make a protein shake |
| Fiancé walks into my office | Put my phone down and turn away from my laptop |
Adversity
Many things will get in the way of my goals throughout the year. These should mostly be predictable, so by making a plan now for what I should do when I face those issues, I will be prepared and the action I take will become as much of a habit as my regular routine would be. Here are a few:
| Goal | Adversity | Plan |
|---|---|---|
| Be 100% sober | At a bar with no NA options | Order a seltzer with lime |
| Gain 10 lbs. of muscle | Traveling and no weights available | Have an intense bodyweight routine planned and do that instead |
| Read every week | Book I want is not available to check out | Make a list of many books I want to read ahead of time, and schedule holds now so I can have options. |
Plans for Staturdays
Now to the specifics for this site. As you probably know, Staturdays started as a college football stats and analytics blog by my brother Drew and I. He was a student studying Data Science and I was an aspiring Data Scientist doing marketing. We did a weekly podcast, I wrote a weekly newsletter, we did bets and Elo ratings and rankings and more. At our peak, we had thousands of visits per month (albeit mostly on the homepage and stats glossary), and a handful of listeners to the podcast. But we were having fun.
I’m a bit sad that those times are long-gone, but so much has changed.
Our lives have changed: I’m a full-time data scientist now, and doing stats as both my day job and as a hobby just doesn’t hit like it used to. Drew is a full-time analyst doing data science as well. We both have long-term partners and dogs.
College football has changed. The portal changed everything with college football. A team can get really good or really bad overnight because roster turnover is so high. An entire squad of players can follow a coach somewhere else and turn a bad program into a great one. A few guys can leave and cripple a great program quickly. I’m not saying we can’t keep up if we tried, but I don’t know if I want to. I’ve lost a lot of love for the sport as a whole. I still love my team and love watching, but it’s so different, and I’m curious to hear if others feel that way too.
Sports betting has changed. When we started, sports betting was just becoming legal in some states and was still getting off the ground. It was just something kind of fun to do. However, the incessant advertising for sports betting has gotten out of hand, as have the tie-ins with leagues and teams. The risk of match-fixing is real and we’ve already started to see some of it pop up in the US. But most of all, I’m just very concerned with the amount of money regular people are wagering and losing on sports. Regular people that were previously not losing $3,000 a year on sports betting are now doing that… people that I know. I have the self-control and financial discipline to make small bets for fun, but many people do not, and I don’t know if I want to contribute to that by posting my bets and having some readers take them as if they’re sure investments.
The internet has changed. We used to share our stuff on Twitter.com. There was a big community of CFB stats nerds there, and a lot of casual fans and betting enthusiasts as well who were interested in our work. That has fizzled out, and I’ve stepped back from Twitter since it fundamentally changed as well. The algorithm is different. Bots and paid accounts win out over authentic people and conversations. A lot of people have left. We tried Substack as well, but we don’t own our page and it’s geared towards recurring newsletters which is not exactly what we’re going for. Reddit mods don’t like links to third-party content. To summarize: everything is very scattered and fractured.
Our interests have changed. As I said, I’ve fallen out of love with college football a bit, and shifted more towards some less popular sports like Formula 1, Indycar, Golf, Tennis, and Soccer. I’m aware that the followers of Staturdays did not sign up to hear about these things, but I may want to write about them in the future. Additionally, I’m not an expert on any of these sports, so starting to write about them has large upfront costs of acquiring knowledge, doing research, and finding and analyzing data if it’s available. I also want to write about things that are not sports-related at all sometimes.
People have changed. I know my attention span is getting shorter and shorter. The world as we know it is geared toward quick-hit video consumption. Do people still want to sit down and read long-form analysis like this? I don’t know.
Weighing all this, I’ve decided to carry on with writing when inspiration strikes, and hopefully more regularly if I get into a routine. I’m going to do all of my writing here at staturdays.com, because it’s my site and I own it and its content. I’m not going to split off and maintain multiple places for different subjects or sports. Rather, I’m redesigning the page tree so you can find exactly what you’re interested in, and I can write about exactly what I want at the time without one affecting the other. If you’re just in it for college football, then that category of posts will still be available to you. Whether I add to it or not is yet to be determined.
I think this is the best of both worlds: I don’t fragment the internet anymore than it already is. There’s one place to find my stuff and it’s right here. You know where to find it. I hope you’ll stop by and join me now and then.
Staturdays 