Habit Tracking: Week 52.5 (December 21 - December 27)

[I like to end my tracker at the end of the year, and begin again at the start, which means that most years there are partial weeks to end and start on.]

This week, a sticker by my friends the Atomic Pixies. I like the blue fairy, and it felt appropriately wintery and peaceful for the close of the year.

The time between Christmas and New Year's always feels a little weird. This span of four days was easy - two and a quarter of them I had off. I did manage to get a lot of what I'd hoped to completed - reviews, end of year stuff, etc.

Goals for the week:

• I did finish reading The Fragile Threads of Power
• I started reading Manhunt
• I worked on my reviews for December books
• I posted those reviews
• I did write up my 2025 reflections
• I declared a goal of 75000 words for 2026 at both getyourwordsout and inkingitout
• I mostly finished my reading page
• I didn't send thank you cards... there was apparently some drama that means I should no longer send anything to one part of the family
• New Year's Eve happened!
• I did my final getyourwordsout check-in for the year: 15034 words written in December; 116015 for the year
• We went and got crickets and more fruit flies

Tracked habits:

• Work - 1.75/4 - Monday/Tuesday are my days off, and we closed a couple hours early on Wednesday
• Household Maintenance - 3/4
• Physical Activity - 1/4
• Wrote 500/1000+ Words - 2/4 - both days over 1000 words
• Wrote on 2nd+ Draft - 0/4
• Meta Work - 4/4
• Personal Writing - 4/4
• Other Creative Things - 3/4
• Reading - 4/4 - I finished The Fragile Threads of Power and my ebook side-read; I started reading Manhunt
• Attention to Media - 4/4 - Sunday we watched some snow storm chase; Monday watched paranormal stuff and reviews; Tuesday had storm chasing and reviews in the background; Tuesday we watched a livestream counting down NYE stuff.
• Video Games - 0/4
• Social Interaction - 3/4

Total words written: 8592 on reviews and reflecting

Intentions for 2026

This year really doesn’t feel much like a year has passed, y’know?

Not just in the “how has it been a full year? Wasn’t last January like ten minutes ago?” way, which… I mean, yeah, that too, but it always feels like that, ha. 2025 just felt really disconnected, even more so than I expected. Maybe it’s the abnormally warm weather, but Christmas hardly felt like Christmas, and still sort of feels like it didn’t happen (despite having a nice one), and it definitely doesn’t feel like we’re moving into a new year!

(Sure, there’s no literal reason that the move from December 31 to January 01 is a more meaningful change than any other day. But at least sometimes I feel a sense of closure when one year ends, and some enthusiasm for another one starting. That feeling is so completely absent this year, ha.)

I have stuck with habit tracking for another year, and I plan to do so again this upcoming year. I mostly plan to track the same habits, with one change. A couple years ago, I separated 2nd+ draft writing out from the rest of my writing, because I wanted to see how different my pace was for first vs second drafts. Now I’ve been having a terrible time getting anything written at all, much less to the point that additional drafts are a consideration, so that’s just kind of… a wasted category. Instead, this year I think I’ll split it into fiction vs other writing. I still count my other writing as writing: writing reviews, or other things that require a bit more effort than a typical journal entry. But for now, I think that’s a more worthwhile distinction for me to be able to look at.

A lot of my intentions for this year are pretty similar to last year. It doesn’t feel like a “new” year, and there’s not a lot that I truly want to do differently. The things I succeeded at are things I want to keep doing, the things I didn’t are things I want to try to do again.

I do still have the same feeling that I did last year, where the general State of the World meant that it feels… petty? inconsequential? to be worrying about little individual goals and things. The world definitely isn’t feeling better right now, but I’m trying to look at this the same way I did last year:
Setting these intentions is a way to say that I do have plans to stick around, and do more than stagnate. The things may be small, but… whether things get better or worse on the grander scale, at least I will have done good and worthwhile things on the smaller scale. Reading good books and going to good places will be good regardless.

That said…

( Here are the intentions I’m setting for 2026: )

20 intentions for the year, some of which are repeats, some of which are new. I still anticipate time management being the biggest struggle, since so many things take time and energy, and I can’t do all of them at once. That’s nothing new! The battle is ongoing.