New Year, New You

Here's how I've been doing my annual reviews for the last three years: fortuitously, they've also been my happiest years, and this process takes less than an hour.

1. Open your phone and go to your photos
   

2. On an iPhone, pinch to zoom in and go to the first week of the prior year - scroll through the pictures you took week by week (I'm sure Android has a similar feature)

   

   Pinch to get to those images from that week

   
   

3. Save photos that brought you the most joy and contentment to a folder called the best of 25

   

   Screenshot of some of what I got up to and enjoyed the most

4. Book more time in 2026 with the people who were in those photos, or book experiences that were similar to those photos - you're putting in all of the things you love on the calendar in advance

Now do the opposite of this to find what you want to do less of:

1. Go to your work calendar and zoom out to week by week, and go back to Jan 1
   

2. Look for meetings or experiences that felt like they crushed your soul or just made you miserable, write them in a google doc and title it "what to avoid in 2026"
   

3. If any of those things still exist on your calendar for 2026 - remove them as fast as possible or take steps to remove them as fast as possible

This is a fairly simple process, but I find we often capture the things we enjoy most in pictures, and the onerous ones end up on our calendars.

Let me know if you’ve got any rituals you live by.

Ai Is Here

We’ve tracked the source of our gym leads for the past seven years.

Google, word of mouth etc. All up there’s about ten different sources.

For seven years google and “word of mouth” has been our top lead gen channels. But that’s quickly changing.

In 2023 we got a single lead from Ai.

By the end of 2024, we were getting one per month.

Now our run rate is one per week from Ai. By the end of this year I expect Ai to be our second biggest lead source, taking over Google.

We’ve not put any specific effort into “Ai marketing” so I don’t have learnings to share on how to do this.

But it’s safe to assume now, that if you’re not getting leads from Ai, you’re falling behind and might want to investigate why.