This isn’t a story about New Year’s resolutions, but it is about what happens when you pay attention to the tiny daily moments that comprise a year.
As I set out to plan another 12 months of my life last week, I realised I was operating less with big aspirational dreams and more with tiny, measurable habits that would build into a blueprint for the person I wanted to be by December 2026. There’s no marathon-running or mountain-climbing or ambitious metrics for money saved or books read. The bucket lists and vision boards I’ve seen populating my friends’ social media feeds these past few weeks satisfy my curiosity the same way eavesdropping on first dates at restaurants does.
Credit: Robin Cowcher
I learnt recently about Misogi, a Japanese concept that began as a purification ritual to cleanse the self (freezing water is involved) in preparation for a fresh start. This satisfying purge has been co-opted by the wellness industry and by tech bros whose only experience of self-improvement involves personal and physical suffering. The goal-setting element of Misogi is less about a long list of aspirations to achieve, and more about finding just one ambition to focus on. One that can take a year to achieve, and even then it’s complicated enough that success isn’t guaranteed. The challenge is in chasing personal growth, through any means necessary.
My own boring challenge is less intense than the hyper-productivity version of Misogi, and less public-facing than the pretty visuals I’ve seen splashed across Instagram. It’s one that requires checking in on myself via a very amateur Google spreadsheet every day that forces me to do the unthinkable: pay close, granular, macroscopic attention to myself.
This will be the fifth year I’ve spent tracking my habits and behaviour. It started in 2022 when, after two years of lockdowns, I re-emerged into the world with no concept of what I’d done or consumed in all that time. Two years felt like such a long time and I felt like I’d lost it. So I started setting goals: not spending mindlessly, quitting smoking, reading more. And each day, before I went to bed, I’d pull up my Google doc and log how I’d gone meeting those metrics that day.
Taking tiny actions one day at a time felt manageable in a way that big, ambitious aims for 12 months didn’t.
By the end of 2025, I had enough data to see I’d spent just over 200 days reading 45 books. I watched more than one movie a week in cinemas (and twice that number at home). I found consistency in strength training – not to build giant muscles or look different, but to ladder up to the lifelong goal of one day being the oldest person at the racks. In ticking boxes and writing tiny notes every day, I made my life legible to myself in a way that many people don’t. In some ways, this is as satisfying as a big, painful goal worthy of the annual Misogi: the mountain can be climbed, but the spreadsheet is eternal.
The patterns can be fun to notice. Now I can see that the weeks when I’m the least financially secure I do the most impulse shopping. The effect my menstrual cycle has on my ability to lift heavy is undeniable. Even the thickest and most intimidating book can be read in under a week. But the real point isn’t just to spot the patterns, it’s to refuse to let the weeks, months and years – my life – disappear, like those lonely ones did in 2020 and 2021.
I often get asked how I “find the time” to consume all that I do. It most often happens when I describe the 14 seasons of Real Housewives of New Jersey I watched this year (my own personal Everest, and one just as exhausting to conquer) or admit I saw Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film One Battle After Another – which goes for almost three hours – at the cinema three times. (With plans for a fourth.)
The thing the data makes clear is that the time is always there, it’s just about delegating it. For me, that’s usually about carving it out away from my phone screen or late nights at my computer. Every dinner with friends is a choice. Every book is a choice.
Making the choice to track it all is a kind of uncool and unglamorous and endless one. But it’s one that keeps me accountable to myself and in constant dialogue with my time and priorities. It’s about witnessing every day, via a million tiny pixels.
