Geek's Guide to Getting Better

This week I realised something terrifying: I have no idea why I’m doing any of this.

In my last post, I mentioned something Derek Sivers said: most people don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing. That line stuck with me. If I don’t have that clarity—if I can’t name my ‘why’—then how the hell am I supposed to know what direction to go in?

Blindly struggling forward isn’t strategy. It’s survival. And I’m tired of surviving.

I need a plan. And to build one, I need to know where I’m starting from.

How do you figure out what you need to do when you don’t even know where you’re starting from? I went around in a circle for a few weeks over this, until I settled on the idea of treating this the way I would a programme of work in my job. If I need to figure out what’s wrong, then we start from an audit.

I sat down at my computer, screamed my frustrations into ChatGPT, and together we came up with a plan of attack. It took hours—and several rewrites—to figure out what I was even trying to do. I didn’t just want a surface-level check-in. I wanted to rip off the covers and stare directly into the crawlspace of my life. To unpick every thread—good, bad, and bewildering—and lay it all out without flinching.

Eventually, I landed on a structure that broke my life down into key domains: things like Physical Health, Career, Finances. The full list is below if you’re curious.

My domains

• Physical health
• Mental health
• Education and learning
• Career (current role and future development)
• Work-life balance
• Relationships (friends, family, romantic)
• Financial health (income, budgeting, savings and debt)
• Home and environment (organisation, living situation, daily routines)
• Hobbies (creative outlets, physical activity, entertainment)
• Community (volunteering, civic engagement, networking)
• Spirituality
• Mindfulness

This seemed to me to be a pretty exhaustive list and I couldn’t think of a single area of my life that didn’t fit under one category or another.

Domains determined, the next step was to drill down into each of them. I pulled together a template with multiple questions for each area, asking me to really focus down into the specifics of each domain. The questions were designed to leave no stone unturned. I want this to be a framework I can come back to year after year to look at and see that ongoing progress.

If you’re doing your own version of this, steal the template. Hack it apart. Make it yours.

Annual Review Template (Markdown)

So why an “audit”? Well, I figured that if I want to take this journey seriously, and if I want to really push myself to accept the harsh truths and make real, meaningful progress, then I needed to approach this as objectively as I can. An audit seemed like the appropriate way to do it. This stage is not about making any judgements, it is just about capturing things as they currently are, so that I can go through it in detail and pick out the bits I want to work on this year, and make those my priority.

And there were a couple of key themes that my life audit 2025 brought out, some of which I expected, some which were more sharply highlighted than I expected. The five key themes I identified were:

1. Progress in my life breaks down from a lack of reliable and sustainable systems to get me where I want to go.
   I constantly try new things, attempt to make change, but fall short each and every time because I lack consistency. I rely on motivation and positivity and just hoping that it will happen. The systems in my life don’t support change, they encourage stagnation.
2. I am currently living a life which is out of sync with who I am at my core.
   I am trying to be lots of different things to lots of different people. I flex and shift my understanding of who I am to fit the needs of the situation, so much so that I don’t really know who I even am anymore. I am pulling at the seams to make it work, but I am losing myself in the middle.
3. I have been trying to make change out of a shame-based self-discipline.
   If I fail, or if I am unable to do something I intended, I treat it as a personal failure. I am less because I didn’t do it. I tell myself I am pathetic because I didn’t go to the gym. That I am awful because I didn’t eat healthily. I have to “make it up” and repent for my poor behaviours.
4. I have a distinct lack of a solid foundation on which to affect meaningful long-term change.
   My days run on chaos. There’s no structure—just a string of reactions and guilt-fuelled decisions. I get up and hope for the best. I fall into bed whenever I manage to get myself to stop what I’m doing. I eat when I remember, I go for a walk if I feel like it. I go to the gym when I can guilt myself into doing it. I write when I can be bothered.
5. I crave connection and often seek this out at the cost of my dignity or personal values.
   Some of my friendships are surface level, and some are barely even that. I have a deep seated need to feel wanted and I am willing to say anything, do anything, be anything– just to feel that validation. Even when it costs me parts of myself.

Reading it back still makes my stomach drop.

I have to admit, I sat with this for a while. Seeing my responses laid out bare like that and identifying these key patterns of behaviour, was an incredibly difficult experience. Those key themes are a stark look at the core, fundamental problems that I have spent the last 8 months trying to identify. Turns out, I did know what was wrong, I just didn’t know how to articulate it.

But what do I do with this? Those themes are huge, and they are not something I can change overnight. I can’t devise some three step plan to radically shift things overnight. That just isn’t how these kinds of issues work. So, what can I do? I can take these themes and identify one thing I can work toward, one step I can take. One experiment I can try to see if it makes a difference.

The core goals for my next 12 months are starting from foundations and building into core pillars of my life, my physical health, my creative practice, and my emotional wellbeing. These are the three I am focusing on for now. Each month, I have a small selection of goals that will build me toward those overarching objectives. Every month I will review my progress.

Consider me to be under Regulatory Oversight. I’ve appointed myself as the inspector. Full accountability. No more fudging the numbers. I need a firm hand at the wheel to steer this ship and there is a lot of work to be done to get things right. It feels a little hopeless, but I remind myself that the aggregation of marginal gains will see me through this. Once those miniscule efforts reach a critical threshold, they will begin paying dividends.

So, that’s the starting point. Cold. Stark. Harrowing. A reflection of where I truly am right now, and some vague understanding of the way forward. I hope that in a year’s time I am writing about how successful the year has been. The plan is good. I just don’t trust myself to follow through.

And that terrifies me.