GHDR 2026: The Kickoff

As I sat down to write this post, my first sentence started with “for more than a decade…” And I thought to myself, “No, that can’t be right.”

Turns out …

For more than a decade, I have watched my friend Sri’s novel approach to the sticky problem of self-improvement, long-term goals, and resolutions. You can read all about the first go round (and if your interested, here’s all of the GHDR things), but the gist of it – at least, my understanding of the gist of it – is to lean into and even leverage the arbitrary nature of most resolutions. There is nothing noteworthy about New Year’s Day, except that it is when we reset our calendar. It’s not the Solstice. It’s not an Equinox. We make resolutions on New Year’s Day because, well, we all decided to, at some point.

But, what if we didn’t?

The pressure of making a New Year’s resolution is significant. There are probably millions of characters written on making a good resolution and not falling prey to the all too common failed resolutions by mid-February. There are books, and YouTube videos, and blog posts … and it all feels exactly like the kind of thing I don’t want to participate in.

So, what if we picked a different day? Groundhog’s day, for example. And what if we built in a check-in on “double days” 2/2, 3/3, 4/4, 5/5, 6/6, etc. to avoid the dreaded resolution “fall off.” That is the gist of GHDR, the GroundHog Day Resolution.

For the longest time, the Groundhog Day Resolution was something that I didn’t participate in, either. I was looking for my own path and I did not have a great track record with goals, resolutions, and the like. But, mostly, I had a thing about being a part of something with others when I know that I might not be good at it – and I needed to get over it.

Let’s pretend that this is me getting over it.

My Take on GHDR

On of the things I love about Sri’s approach is that it is inherently flexible. If you look at the long record on Sri’s website, their own approach has changed multiple times. Some years are business focused, others are more personal, and many are some combination of both. “Doing what works” is baked in to the whole approach, so let me unpack what I hope will work for me.

First, you will not see any SMART goals, KPIs, OKRs, or other such targets. At this point in my life, I do not find those nearly as inspiring as identity statements and systems. Stealing a whole lot from the work of James Clear‘s work in Atomic Habits, a bit from Ryder Carroll and his Bullet Journal, and the work of Cal Newport, I have come to believe that imagining the kind of life you want to live and the kind of person you want to be is more valuable than trying to choose a target to hit. And developing habits, systems and processes to incrementally move toward that vision is far better than a rigid plan to get to some number that you’ve chosen.

Second, as I continue to mash up the work of my favorite productivity authors, I’ve decided to think about this using the framework of AREAS OF FOCUS, INTENTIONS, COMMITMENTS, and EXPERIMENTS.

AREAS OF FOCUS is just a way to divide my life into manageable parts. I’m stealing from a least a dozen places when I chose BODY, MIND, and SOUL and mostly Cal Newport and Reinhard Engels when I added META and CRAFT. INTENTIONS are the way I am describing the envisioned reality that I want to be true about me. COMMITMENTS are the habits, processes, and systems that I am, well, committed to – the things that I am considering a part of my life. EXPERIMENTS are taken from a book that I am still in the middle of, Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff. Unlike a resolution, these are short term trial runs to see if a thing works for me. They probably aren’t “true” tiny experiments, but I’ll fix that as I tweak things.

An important piece of this is to try and consistently build up evidence that my INTENTIONS are more than just wishes. Each COMMITMENT and, in part, the EXPERIMENTS, are small data points building the case for who I think I am. To that end, many of them will have a “minimum effective dose” … something that feels easy but also feels like it counts. In some cases, these can feel silly – no one would make a New Year’s resolution to work out 3 minutes a day, but since I am starting from zero … for now three minutes is enough. When it feels too easy, I can always increase it. But it is enough for me to feel like I am someone who works out. There will, of course be an IDEAL value, something that feels like a realistic stretch, but anything above the minimum counts as a non-zero day and evidence that I am who I think I am. These are noted as [Tracking Code] Minimum | Ideal

These things will help the other things work. I am using a Bullet Journal for day to day organization, capture and thinking. I want to try and integrate a way to actually have data for this GHDR thing, so that’s the experiment. + – → is shorthand for “Plus, Minus, Next”, which is shorthand for “what has moved me toward my intentions, what has moved me away, what can I do different(or some more) tomorrow”

I need to improve my health, for sure. But rather than set a target weight, etc. I am aiming to live a healthy life, one step at a time. This is also one of my “do I really hate gamification, or do I just hate losing” experiments. I think that I should be the kind of person that responds positively to gamification, but I’ve been avoiding it. Time to figure out if that avoidance is legit or not.

Reading is something I am just getting back to after a few hard years where I didn’t read so much. It has been a lot of fiction so far, and I’d eventually like to get closer to the one fiction book a week and one non-fiction every two weeks pace that I used to maintain. Duolingo is dipping my toe into gamification again. (and hopefully getting good enough to beat my nephew at chess) And Zentangle is a doodling-meets-meditation practice I have enjoyed in the past.

My GRAY commitment is a little bit coded, and I don’t need to get into all the details, but I have decided that there are some things I don’t need to view, read, or listen to at all (“black” things) and things that may nit be explicitly harmful, but aren’t doing me any good either (think doomscrolling – “grey” things). These categories have more personal meaning to me, and some specificity that, again, I’m not going to share here. The Daily Office is a prayer and scripture practice that you can google if you want. And having friends is just good for my soul. (And I’m not as good a friend as I’d like to be)

These are about my work. FlyFree is something I’m not ready to put on the internet just yet, but if you know me, fee free to ask. Everything else is some first steps too build up a case (for myself) that I am, in fact, bringing my best self to my work.

March should have some updates on progress with some metrics if everything goes well, and maybe my first round of tweaks.