I actually do the whole new year's resolutions thing, and it actually works. The key thing to understand is that humans are creatures of habit. Doing the same action you've already done regularly takes very little mental effort, whereas inserting a new one-time task takes much more. And so if you want yourself to do certain things more, you need to make it a habit. The year boundary is as good a place as any to evaluate the habits that you're chosen to impose on yourself, and see whether they are effective and sustainable, and adjust, add or remove any. My style is to make them measurable, trackable, and targeted to exactly the level of effort that I know will not make me want to abandon them, even during my months of busiest work, most intensive travel schedule or call schedule, etc. Examples I've done: * Walk an average of >= 6km/day each month * Run >= 50km each month * Write >= 1 blog post each month * Study some language for 30 min each week * Do >= 2 major cryptography programming projects each year At every year boundary, re-evaluate your old list, and decide on your new list. And yeah I have txt files for tracking this (sorry, not gonna use some corposlop app that makes me dependent on third-party servers) You actually want each one to be relatively trivial, so that you can stack multiple, and because the benefits of maximizing are less important than the risk that you will give up on the whole thing. This has worked well for me and I recommend it.