Martin Hähnel

Yearly Theme 2025 Recap - Year Of The Quarter

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I'm slightly late with this and so have to keep it somewhat shorter than last year. To find out what a "Yearly Theme" even is, look at my last year's post, or watch this video from CGP Grey:

In 2025 my theme was "Year Of The Quarter". First I had the idea to name it "Year Of The ZKN", because the idea of living "out of" my notes system (ZKN is short for Zettelkasten) intrigued me. But I discovered relatively quickly that Obsidian's plugin landscape had somewhat decayed and many good plugins for crucial aspects of a life organized within a notes system and app - like a calendar plugin or a todo plugin - were creating a lot of friction.

In the beginning of the year/end of last year, I spent more time watching Ali Abdaal videos. Abdaal is a productivity person that creates a lot of content in this space. One of his videos that stuck with me was this one:

The main thing that spoke to me was "the execution gap" meaning that most people know enough to do the thing they want to do, they just don't do it. Another thing I took away was to think about goals/or "quests" for the quarter instead of the year. And finally: Abdaal offered a free zoom-based event every quarter to reflect and plan what's next. This all motivated me to try this quarterly thing and do a little more with my time. Smaller goals, but more of them. Maybe that could work?

Abdaal recommended having two main goals/quests - one for "life" one for "work" and a few "side quests" for other stuff. Here are mine throughout the year:

Quarter 1

Quarter 2

Quarter 3

Quarter 4

So let's talk about these a moment.

I think it is kind of interesting how my quarters reflect the amount of exhaustion I felt from trying to pursue so many things. It became clear very quickly that going to gym ("Implement Solid Health Routine") and taking part in a Finnish course and doing lots of reflective exercises and keeping all my task-management ducks in a row was a fun but ultimately way too exhausting way of living. I knew it already after 3 short months. I still created an accountability forum (didyoudoit) and started posting weekly threads for people to share their plans for the week. It helped me being accountable but at the cost of increasing burnout from the accumulated things in my life (these "quests", my family life, my job...).

In quarter 2 a "slow down" side quest was introduced that tried to find pockets of time to counter balance the crazy amount of things I had put on my plate. It didn't go so well. I noticed how my life was not as malleable as I maybe had thought. Introducing a bunch of new stuff all the time was hard. I couldn't integrate new things as easily as Abdaal seemingly could.[1] So I just came up with "Quests" for things that I had to maintain anyway ("Clean Up") or things that my job demanded ("AI Code Craft"). "Nordic Productivity" on the other hand was an ill-fated idea to start my own youtube channel. I never even started to write a script. That was a pattern this year: Noticing what I didn't need or want to do. As much as I enjoy watching Youtube: Streaming or filming myself is something I don't want to do.

Quarter 3 was an attempt to combine my insight of not doing as much with my wish for some forward momentum. I wanted a house with garden so I made it a squishy goal. I tried to figure out a way to find time to express my feelings around living according to my own seasons or "cycles" (Lebenszyklus). By this point I had read "Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Finally Make Time for What Counts" by Oliver Burkeman that seemed to speak to me directly by basically extinguishing the goals-based (call them "quests" all you want) thinking and replacing it with a thinking along the lines of resonance (itself a concept developed by the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa). My thinking shifted away from a planning and control based mindset towards a mindset of being in flow with my own life and enjoying the ride by gripping less tightly and actually doing the things that I wanted to do instead of preparing for them endlessly (and then never doing them).

In quarter 4 I finally let go. No goals, no quests, nothing. I stopped things like counting calories (even though I had lost 7 kilos - it made me too miserable and restricted in my eating habits) and only kept things that resonated with me without having to track them (and then track the tracking and reflect on tracking the tracking and so forth). I reduced most of my task management stuff to a simple daily list with repeating tasks and some one-offs for things that needed to be done. But I don't track or reflect or review these things anymore. And it has been such a bliss![2]

All in all I think this year showed me once again that trying to force a goals-based life is a good way to burn yourself out. It's not even that it wasn't an interesting ride, but it was simply unsustainable. And looking back it seems unwise to wear such a tight corset (have this many goals over this period of time) instead of following my own nose: Just because I came up with something at the beginning of a quarter (or a year or whatever) doesn't mean it keeps being a good idea going forward.

That's really what makes yearly themes great though: That they are really not about consistency but about color: A theme is an invitation not a commitment.

  1. Although I felt like I started to see the seams in those live zoom-events a little: Part of why content creators in the productivity space can do this, is because it's literally their job to produce new content in their particular niche, whereas I am employed to work 8 hours and have only limited time and brain cycles that are just mine. ↩︎

  2. If you'd ask my partner she'd probably say that I am still doing many of those things: Like keeping a budget or tracking my sleep. But these are actually resonating with me. ↩︎