2026 is upon us! For most of my life, I dismissed New Year's resolutions as kind of pointless; if you wanted to accomplish some kind of goal, why not get started on it immediately instead of waiting for the turn of the year? But I've softened on the idea. I set goals for myself all the time, and while I'm not terrible at holding myself to them, the ones that I formulate on a more day-to-day basis tend to be transient, short-term, or end up being forgotten. I have big ideas all the time, and sometimes they manifest into a plan -- but it's not uncommon for those big ideas to get lost in a sea of other big ideas and life distractions. So having a reset point in the year as a reminder to introspect about this stuff, to prioritize larger-scale goals, and to look back on the goals of the previous year, is something that I now quite enjoy.

2025 Goals

My New Year's resolutions for 2025 were:

Create something. Anything. Very loosely, I imagined this to be a tech project, or some kind of creative endeavour involving writing or music production. I'm willing to give myself a check mark here with this website/blog being the "something" that I created. It's a pretty humble achievement, but it took at least some amount of concerted effort, and blended some tech (e.g. getting reacquainted with front-end development) with a bit of creativity (e.g. site design, writing blog posts, etc.).
Be a better listener. At some point last year, I recognized that I was just spacing out too often when speaking to people. Some of the time, this would involve me half being on my phone, and the other half of the time, it'd be just me allowing my mind to wander. Both of those, as much as I'd hate to say it, mostly come down to disrespect on my part. While I didn't establish any particular KPI around this goal, I managed to build and sustain a few positive habits: I'm more conscious about putting my phone face down or away when in conversation. I avoid even casually looking at it as catching a glimpse of notifications is usually enough to pull away my focus. If I do want to check something on my phone, I make a point to request to be excused for a moment. And outside of phone-related distractions, I've found that treating focus as a muscle that simply needs to be exercised has gone a long way. It surprised me how much more I was able to stay engaged simply by making the intention to give my undivided attention; and that includes being dialed into remote Slack/Teams/Zoom calls where it's easy to turn off your camera and interact with other distractions. Anyway, I don't pretend that I'm now perfect about these things, but I can say with sincerity that I've gotten better about this in 2025!

2026 Goals

And now for 2026! I was pretty happy with how 2025 went, so I decided to be slightly more ambitious this year, and slightly more concrete. Here goes:

Weekly prayers at the mosque with family. It's something that I've wanted to do because it overlaps with so many other things that I want to achieve -- doing better at honouring my religious obligations, spending time with my family, being engaged in my local Muslim community, and getting out of the house more. My current relationship with the mosque is mostly limited to Friday prayers. If the family is home (e.g. due to holidays), then we'll usually go together. But during my trip to Dallas earlier in the year, I saw that my family who lives there treats the mosque as a second home, and they're better for it, both spiritually and socially. On that trip I decided that I want to push to have a similar relationship with my local mosque, but that goal quickly fell to the wayside. It's time to give this another go!
Write a novel/novella. I've had an idea for a novel for years, and I decided that in 2026, I will finally write it! I considered doing this as part of my "create something" goal of last year, but ultimately went with something smaller in scope. If I'm being honest though, this is the thing that I really wanted to do, so I'm now officially committing to getting a first draft of this done. I don't pretend that it'll be particularly respectable, and I'm throwing the term "novella" in there to allow myself to reduce the scope if necessary -- but it will be done, and done is better than perfect!