Themes Beat Resolutions Every Time

Reflection fuels growth. The coming year is your chance to make meaningful changes to your work, life, and relationships.

Every year, we have a moment to look back and another to look forward — rather than looking at it as the sunset of this year, it may be helpful to think of it as the sunrise on 2025.

People tend to shy away from the idea of making new year's resolutions, which, honestly -- is perfectly reasonable. Most people tend to fail on their resolutions, and the idea of making a list of goals that you're unlikely to hit feels draining.

Let's skip the guilt-ridden New Year's resolutions that rarely stick. Instead, consider setting a theme for the year ahead. One of my favorite podcasts, Cortex introduces this idea beautifully. Each host selects a theme as a guidepost for the year ahead.

For me, 2025 is the Year of Doubling Down:

• Make Craftwork sing - Our incredible team is building a scalable business that aligns with our ambitions. I'm focused on coordinatation, strategy, empathy for our team & customers.
• Sweat more - I am a more balanced person when I work out more. My goal is 3-4 solid workouts weekly—running, cycling, weightlifting, and yoga.
• Double Readership - My goal is to reach more people with the knowledge I share here. Hearing how my work has helped others is the best possible fuel for that fire.

I'm also doubling down on cutting distractions—removing negativity and toxicity to focus intentionally on what matters most.

If you're setting a theme for the year, I'd love to hear it. What are you focused on for the next 365 days?

Signing off for 2024 - see you on the other side of things.

I've been reflecting on the little habits and tricks that keep my writing process flowing. Maybe these ideas can help spark something for you, too.

I recently added a Series feature to my site—a way to group related posts. It's inspired by Dev.to's implementation, cobbled together in an afternoon. Here's the first few example I've published:

• Fixing My Conversion Problem with Posthog, A 5-part video series about optimizing my newsletter conversion rates.
• JavaScript Tips Quick tips on JavaScript fundamentals I've found useful over the years.
• 🤖 Dependabot Posts about automating dependency updates with Dependabot, consistently a top Google Search result for my site.

There's room for improvement, but I'm happy with the feature so far. Let me know your thoughts—and stay tuned for videos about how I built it.

Many people have asked about how I write and publish articles. The short answer: a single Markdown file + GitHub + automation.

Each post is a Markdown file committed to my site's GitHub repo and published automatically via Pull Requests. The beauty of this process? It works for me. It's simple, distraction-free, and keeps me focused on writing.

I wrote a detailed post about it: Content creation workflow: my writing process

Want to see it in action? I wrote that post during a recent livestream on my YouTube channel.