New Year's Resolutions for 2026

Another year has passed, and what I originally didn't plan to turn into a tradition has become one I never miss: publishing my resolutions for the new year. I always fail at some of my resolutions, but I like the effort of reflection and keeping them in mind throughout the year.

Following last year's format, I'll start by reviewing how my 2025 resolutions went, and then I'll set this year's:

2025 in review

What I accomplished:

• Family and friends: Success. I had two weekends with my friends and had a blast. I hope we can do it again this year, hopefully more often, but it's hard to align everyone's schedules. I also bought my daughter her first computer, and I'm in the process of teaching her how to use it. We've traveled as tourists with the kids and they've gotten used to it; they behave like champions.
• Lose weight: Success. I dropped a pant size, but I'm still not at my slimmest. However, I've gained muscle and improved my cardiovascular fitness, so I'm happy with the results.
• New house: Success for now. The renovations have finally begun, although later than I initially expected. It's still too early to know if all the planning efforts will have been worth it, but for now, it's progressing at a good pace and going according to plan.
• Artificial Intelligence: Partial success. I use Perplexity and Venice.ai almost daily for research or to solve problems (like OS or programming errors). I've also played around a bit with image and video generation, but only with online services, which I consider a failure because I wanted to do it locally. I also haven't tried using agents for programming yet; I'd need to run them either locally or in a reasonably private way.

What I didn't accomplish:

• Blog: Failure. I didn't achieve my goal of at least one monthly blog post. I tend to write long ones and, on top of that, I get obsessed with revising and perfecting them over and over. I have 3 articles that are almost ready, but I just can't seem to finish and publish them. At least I'm happy with the quality of the ones I have published.
• Home labbing: On hold. With the delay of the new house, I haven't been able to start setting up the new server yet, and I don't want to spend too much time on the old one because I'll have to migrate everything eventually. Nevertheless, I've set up two new services that I now use almost daily: Jellyfin and Immich.

Spend less time on tasks

As I suppose happens to many people, I feel like I'm drowning in tasks, especially those that don't advance my life goals. My resolution is to put the theoretical knowledge I have about personal productivity into practice to see if I can find a system that works for me.

To start, I need to set my goals better. There are a multitude of systems: SMART, PACT, WOOP, FAST... Just in the process of writing this article, I'm already getting lost analyzing them in detail to decide which is best for me. I need to pick one quickly, apply it to this year's resolutions, and move on.

Then, on a day-to-day basis, I plan to follow this process:

1. Every morning, plan the tasks I intend to tackle.
2. For interruptions that will take less than 5 minutes, do them on the spot.
3. For longer, somewhat urgent interruptions, write them down on a list and do them all either at the end of the day or the beginning of the next day, so they don't interrupt me.
4. For longer, non-immediately urgent interruptions, write them on another list that has a dedicated day during the week.

I'm quite a procrastinator, so I need all the tricks under my belt to not put things off. Some that I need to seriously apply are:

• Break large tasks into several smaller ones. Completing tasks releases dopamine, so the shorter, the better.
• Start with the most difficult or unpleasant task, and give myself a reward when I finish it.
• Resume a formal meditation practice, 15 minutes a day.
• Communicate the most important tasks to someone, to be accountable to them.
• Keep my perfectionism in check, be conscious about what the appropriate level of quality is for what I'm doing.

Photography

I've enjoyed photography for many years, but I admit I've invested too much time processing and organizing my photo collection. I'm simplifying my photography process to have more time for other goals.

In this sense, for months I've been taking most of my photos with my phone; I only take out the "big camera" for portraits and special occasions. Obviously, I miss the quality and precision of the professional camera, but post-processing was taking up too much of my time.

Besides that, I'm in the process of migrating from Digikam to Immich. The idea is for the phone's photos to be auto-uploaded directly to Immich, and I will edit the metadata there. I have an almost-finished article about the philosophy and details behind this migration, so I won't go into more detail for now.

Finally, at the beginning of last year, although I didn't make it a resolution, I decided to start making photo albums. I made a large one with family photos from 2024, and I loved the result. I also made one from a photo session I had with my family and my parents, and I gave them a copy as a gift. I plan to continue making them because I loved looking at photo albums with my parents and hearing the stories when I was little, and I'd like to do the same with my children. As a measurable goal, before the end of the year, I want to have at least the 2025 and 2023 albums printed.

Don't Die

I feel inspired by Bryan Johnson and his Don't Die movement. Most readers probably don't even know him, and those who do or take a first look at his ideas, I bet they think he's a crazy, selfish millionaire seeking immortality. But in my view, he's a pioneer experimenting with his own body to find what works, something the rest of us will benefit from. What costs him $2 million a year will be within anyone's reach in the future, just like with current medicines and treatments that not even kings or the richest people of the past could enjoy.

Anyway, without getting into more philosophy, I'm not trying to replicate his lifestyle by any means, but rather to reflect on the main causes of premature death and address them. To do this, and as a first step, my resolution is to adopt several of Bryan Johnson's recommendations:

• Redouble my efforts to lose weight.
• Reduce consumption of processed and ultra-processed foods, as well as sugar and other anti-nutrients. Make them a very occasional thing.
• Reduce alcohol to a minimum. I've been able to see with my smartwatch that it affects my sleep very negatively, preventing me from reaching the REM phase. And then there are the other negative effects I'm not measuring.
• Regular sleep schedule. In my case, it will be from 11:00 pm to 7:15 am.
• Dinner at 7 pm, 4 hours before sleeping.
• Screens off at 10:30 pm.
• Read from 10:30 pm to 11:00 pm.

Regarding weight loss, I'm experimenting to see if I can find a diet that works for me and is sustainable.

On one hand, I usually do prolonged fasts of 3-4 days twice a year. Although the effect on weight loss is limited, I do them mainly for the evidence that they are healthy for the body in general, due to effects like autophagy.

I've also tried strict intermittent fasting, eating only within a 6-7 hour window. My implementation has been to have dinner around 7 pm; in the morning, only black coffee; break the fast with lunch around 1 pm; protein shake in the mid-afternoon. I go to the gym just before lunch, and although I haven't felt a crash, it's probably not ideal to go while fasting.

The third experiment is to increase the amount of protein in my diet, up to 1.8g of protein per kg of body weight. This helps build and maintain muscle mass and also helps to feel more satiated and eat less. However, it's difficult to combine this with intermittent fasting, so I'm trying it without the fast.

My main metric is to lower my visceral fat percentage, which is correlated with cardiovascular problems. Reaching the healthy range would be the best measure of success. Another simpler metric would be to get down to at least 85 kg while maintaining or improving my physical fitness (cardio and strength). Not because 85 kg is my ideal weight, but because I now weigh 90 kg, it would be good progress.

Portuguese

I've been living in Portugal for 4 years, and I can get by pretty well in Portuguese now. The Portuguese accent is difficult because they speak fast and "eat" letters (just like Andalusians, go figure!), but I can understand almost everything they say now. My pronunciation has improved a lot, and I have enough vocabulary and expressions to have long conversations in Portuguese. I throw in a lot of Spanish words, but they understand me and generally appreciate the effort.

My resolution is to look for Portuguese classes, at least one day a week, to really improve. I'll probably look for a private tutor because you get much more out of the time; it always annoys me when a group class goes at the pace of the slowest person in the class.

Blog

The perennial resolution: write more on the blog. It couldn't be missing.

I don't think I was wrong last year in identifying the reasons why I struggle to publish more, but it's clear that wasn't enough to correct my ways. Maybe I'll read the book Atomic Habits, which comes highly recommended for establishing new habits.

An additional motivation I realized a few months ago is the autobiographical nature of the blog. I'm excited that my children might read it in the future; it's a window into my thoughts, my interests, my worries. I want to pour more personality and history into my future articles.

Something that, although it may not seem like it, helped me last year was using my tablet to write the articles. It's much more accessible for me to grab the tablet when I have 5 minutes of inspiration than to sit at the computer for 5 minutes. Or I take it out of the house and write when I have a few dead minutes while waiting. I use Markor to write the articles, they sync to the computer with Syncthing, and when they're ready, I give them the final touches on the computer and publish them.

Self-hosting

As soon as the new house is ready, I'll be very busy setting up my new home server; it will keep me occupied for months and provide a whole new series of articles for this blog. But in the meantime, I'm not going to sit on my hands with my current server; I have at least three ideas I want to implement soon:

1. Home Assistant, to start learning how it works so I'm not a novice when I set it up in the new house, which will have home automation in every corner.
2. Paperless-ngx, a system for organizing paperwork. I plan to have the scanner save files directly to the server, so Paperless can process and archive them automatically. I think it will be a useful and time-saving system once set up, in support of my resolution to waste less time on tasks.
3. Remote backup of my devices and critical data, that has to happen this year. I already have local backup, but it doesn't give me enough peace of mind, plus it's not automated.