My yearly theme for 2024

For a number of years I have been setting yearly themes, an idea that has been made popular by the Cortex podcast. Listen to this episode from 2019 for a detailed overview but in a nutshell, yearly themes are a broader, and more nuanced, alternative to setting resolutions.

The idea is to pick some overarching theme that ties together various hopes, dreams and ambitions. Themes can sometimes all be built upon a single word. Another key aspect of setting a yearly theme is to regularly check in and assess your progress.

I have been setting a yearly theme for the last few years. The title of these themes have been:

  • 2019 - Rebuilding

  • 2020 - Focus

  • 2021 - Survive (this was the pandemic remember!)

  • 2022 - <no theme set>

  • 2023 - Healthy mind, healthy body

For each of these themes I create a note file which details what general and specific activities I want to achieve as part of that theme. This can include negative activities of course, e.g. don’t binge watch TV.

2024’s theme

Before I reveal my theme for 2024, I need to point out that I really failed on the second part of last year’s theme. The ‘healthy mind’ part was good - e.g. I read more books than I have in a long time, I made more effort to listen to music and play the piano - but I failed miserably at the second part.

My weight in 2023 reached an all-time high and this was driven by a very unhealthy diet that was dominated by an addiction to chocolate. I would buy chocolate every day, often multiple bars. So this has led me to this year’s theme:

  • 2024 - Healthy body, healthy mind

I’m keeping ‘healthy mind’ as part of the theme as there are things that I want to build on that I started doing last year (e.g. listen to entire albums of music to help break my obsession with podcasts).

But the overriding part of my theme is ‘healthy body’ - something which probably more closely resembles traditional new year resolutions. The specific things I am committing to under this bit of the theme are as follows:

  • Exercise 3 times a week

  • Be able to run a 5K park run by the end of the year

  • Eat fruit every day

  • Eat less junk food

  • Don’t buy chocolate bars

  • Make healthier buying choices for the family

I’m hoping that all of these will naturally lead to a reversal of last year’s ever increasing weight, but I’m not listing ‘lose weight’ as part of theme as I want to focus on the underlying things that will help achieve that.

I’m writing this blog post partly to hold myself to account. I know I won’t be perfect (I have not eaten fruit every day!) but I’m using apps such as Streaks on my iPhone to help me stay accountable for some of these activities. At the time of writing I can proudly say that I have not bought any chocolate bars in 2024! I still consume chocolate when the opportunity arises but my overall consumption has dropped massively.

If I’m really feeling brave I will reveal more about my progress in future blog posts…perhaps with more of a focus on my obsessive habit of logging data in spreadsheets (I have over 3,500 measurements of my weight going back to 2009).