968: Habits and Changes We Want to Make in 2026

It's New Year, New Me, New Us, New Wes, New Scott. We're going to be kicking off this year with the type of things that, well, we want to change in ourselves over the course of this year, but also how you can cultivate change in your life and the types of things that you are wanting to see out of yourself over the course of the year. Wes, my man, New Year, New Me. How's it going? Good. You're standing. We're recording this in December. Yeah, standing. That's one of my goals this year. I've got the standing desk and I've forever been a standing desk hater because I say I love the standing desk simply because you can adjust it to be the perfect height for your sitting you can adjust your chair till you feel good and then you adjust your your desk up and down so that it feels good as well but there's got to be something to to the standing right now so I'm feeling it right now so I'm like new you're new me I'm gonna I'm gonna be standing I'm gonna be trying to stand at least what's a good amount of hours that you think i should be standing every week to be not as much as possible as much as possible get those legs some work get a little treadmill walk on that bad boy get them legs moving yeah do some squats you can have your desk here's here's the the power move uh program your desk so that it automatically moves up and down so you got to squat with it that's so stupid i have work to do i'm gonna say yeah i when you have these goals every year you need to like be like we always talk about smart goals right which is like it needs to be specific attainable measurable i'm doing it in the wrong order yeah they're smart time-based yeah so i think i'm going to try to stand for at least two hours a week, which is not a lot, but I hate standing. So here we go. Yeah. There's a book I read last year or the year before about taking like one small step to make any change. I think it's Kaizen. Kaizen was the book. And it was about basically like anytime you're trying to cultivate a habit or a change or anything like that, start with like the smallest possible amount like west i'm gonna stand for the first or i'm gonna stand for like a minute every single day you're you're like the one thing that should be the easiest but i can stand for a minute okay i can stand for 30 seconds a day and then like slowly increase that or integrate it into your life and that makes learning these things a little bit easier but yeah i do agree that as as cliche as that whole smart goals thing is it is a good way it works it's cliche for a reason oh yeah it works that works in like business or anything don't just be like i want to do x y and z more you have to have actual numbers around it so that you can measure if you hit them or not yeah i it is funny so i think some people truly like believe that they are the way they are and they are unable to greatly change or modify things in how they act their life. And I think to some extent, yeah, that's, that's true. But like, I think we all are capable of so much more than what we give ourselves credit for in terms of, like, really being able to enact change on ourselves and our processes and our systems by building in small habits and changing them and getting better about it and all kinds of stuff. And I personally, the types of things that work for me is like a habit tracking. I did build an app habit path.io. I still use this app. It uses zero sync. It's local data. It's super duper fast. And I track so many habits in this thing. I even added like a feature West for tracking like my like daily levels of things like my sleep quality or my like irritability or something like that. So you can just see numbers over time because I I'm greatly motivated by not necessarily like I am motivated by a streak but I am motivated by seeing the things light up over time you love that I do and my my exercise machine I had a four-year streak going a four-year weekly streak going until my concussion and then I lost that four-year streak and it was devastating but nuts yeah I do think that me personally tracking these things can help you pick something that you would I the ideal version of me would be good at this the ideal version of me would be good at email so therefore I'm going to make a task or a habit that is inbox zero and I'm going to have a time in the day that gets me down to inbox zero every single day and or whatever I'm going to build this into my life and you just got to stick to it. I know it's January and habits are so easy to say, I'm going to do this in January and then February, whatever, whatever, whatever. But man, build a system for yourself and stick to that system. I think we are all so capable of it. And I think so many people fall off on these things. Small incremental improvements, man. That can, it can really add up. Every single day. Yeah. You, you've proven in different ways. There's all kinds of stuff that I like wanted to improve on, whether that is like stretching or not drinking alcohol as much or I was having a shoulder pain. So I wanted to hang from a bar. So I put like hanging as a as a daily task and I hung and I fixed my shoulder. But if I didn't have that, I had that as well. I had like a pinch in it and I couldn't like I couldn't lift things up that were like away from my body. And like I had it for like months and I finally just hung like a couple days in a row and I totally solved it. I had a goal that was like, just do a handstand every day. And it wasn't like spend 30 seconds doing handstands. It was just do a handstand every day. Do a single handstand. I got really stinking good at handstands. Do it right now, Scott. Have you done yours today? No. Here we go. I don't have a lot of room here, so. I don't care. Hold on. Hold on. Oh. Oh, gosh. He's going to kick something. Sorry, I have one hand on carpet and one hand on floor. For audio listeners, he just nailed it. Oh, he's doing a second. He's being a show-off now. Oh, my gosh. All right, that's enough. He's being a show-off now. I have very little room to do that. I know. I've been in your office. That's very impressive. I'd be impressed if I could do that at all, let alone in your office. yeah yeah I uh it was one thing I wanted to get better at after doing my uh concussion was getting back into handstands because it's pretty low impact right so yeah beautiful all right next thing what else other habit that I have here I want to learn to wake up early probably my biggest flaw is that I hate waking up and it sucks and I often think like man how sick would it be if I could wake up at like 530 and have a little bit more time because like right now I do the gym twice a week that's just the amount of I have two mornings a week where my wife takes the kids to school my our evenings right now my evenings I used previously I used to be able to just do so much in the evenings I used to do something every night you know the house project or like coding something and like just the way family looks right now I just don't have that time anymore you know by the time you get everybody in bed it's like 9 30 and I just don't have a time for it so i would love to get at least one more gym day in a week and where that time comes from is probably in the morning so i need tips on like how to wake up early because leave them down in the comments because i would love to crack that nut so you think 5 30 that's the time you want to wake up i don't know if it's 5 30 or whatever but it's just earlier like right now i just wake up and i'm just like i hate everything it takes me like a good 20 minutes to just get going you know and I would love to just be a morning person where you could just wake up and like, yeah I have my coffee and I calmly check my emails and I went to the gym and now the kids are waking up and now we can tackle you know but it just like right now it just like chaos as soon as I wake up Yeah. You know what? Here's a way that you can wake up early. You can get a concussion that gives you sleep issues. When I got my concussion, that was like one of my biggest things was that I couldn't sleep. and then when I did go to sleep I would wake up in the middle of the night and then I would wake up again at like four in the morning and not be able to go back to sleep and I will say there was a period there before I got on some medication to help me sleep where I was getting up out of bed at like five o'clock and going downstairs to work because I was like what was the point I'm not gonna go to sleep anyways yeah and I really liked it I was like I didn't really like not sleeping But I really like that time in the morning to get my stuff done. And now I wake up at 7-ish, like 7, 6.30, because the kids got to get to school and stuff. 6, 7. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, they said it. We said it. We did it. Yeah. We did it. Yeah, our kids are big into 6, 7 right now. Oh, man. Mine, too. They're big into it. And I play into it, too. It's great. Although, apparently, there's a new brain rot called 25, which is like Christmas brain rot. So now they're walking around me like 25. I'm just ruining every number. Oh, yes. Okay. Yeah, I know. It is very funny. It is. It is ridiculous. Even like the kids school. They were at like a Halloween assembly and the dance teacher comes out and she's like, is everyone six, seven today? Like the kids win nuts. It's just like so good. Oh, my gosh. It's wild. Yeah. A habit that I would like to cultivate for this year would be to really embrace my to-dos at the start of every day. Any single time that I am feeling scatterbrained or unproductive or like I'm doing this or that or I'm like not feeling like I'm accomplishing a whole lot today. I tell my wife, she's always like, did you do your to-do list for the day? and I have to shamefully go, no, I didn't. And I know if I did, I wouldn't have this problem. And then I do my to-do lists and then I knock things off. So like I really need for my to-do list, which I use the app tweak.so and still really, really love this app for how minimal it is. I need for this system for me every single morning to do my to-dos, like to list them out, to prioritize them, to schedule them, to keep it organized. Because even it was, I did a good job of it. But then by November-ish, especially with the concussion stuff, I know I'm going to be saving that a lot this episode, it really threw me off and things would just stick on my to-do list for months and months and months. And this is like, all right, this is no longer a to-do. This is like, you've tremendously passed this by. So like, I need to really stay on top of my to-do list. what i do is i i use things and i have like an i have an inbox where i just dump everything which is like that that's probably what you're using for it is like i have to do this at some point and what i do is i'll just dump it into my inbox and i also have it it's hooked up to apple reminders so i can just do it from my phone as well i often do it on my watch i'll just be like remind me to to do x y and z and i use that a ton because often i'm just like falling asleep or whatever or like with the kids and I'll go, oh, I forgot to do X, Y, and Z or I need to do this tomorrow or that would be a really good video idea. And I'll just pop it in under my watch and then I'll go in the inbox and then you can drag things into the today, today, any day. I have a whole bunch of different categories that I'll drag things into. I use it also just as like a, just a way to have like video ideas, things like that. Yeah, Tweak has that where they have different lists. So I do have a videos list. I have a 3D print list. I have individual items for projects I'm working on. They sell on marketplace list that for a long time only grew. And guess what, Wes? With the advent of AI browsers, I finally started selling things on marketplace. Oh, man. You know what? I got penalized on marketplace. I took pictures and gave them a chat GPT and said, write a description of what this product is. That's why I've done that. But I got like shadow banned or something on marketplace. like nobody replied to anything that i was i was selling i was like oh i got shadow banned yeah and i tried i i've been posting stuff just regular old so i think they're they're doing something i sold my rower i sold my wi-fi six router i sold all kinds of stuff this year and only because ai helped me do that oh that's great but yeah to-do list is so key and then i'll just drag things into today list and then I'll bubble them I call it I can move them up and down and then just tackle every single one especially when I'm feeling like like you said frazzled I'll have a stack of mail I hate mail so much you get all these mails in the thing you got property taxes that you have to pay and all these like god like health cards that need to be renewed I hate it so much so I'll just have a health stack and then I'll just like blitz through it all at once yeah it makes me what I What I need is a hole in the wall that just drops it into a shredder somewhere or something. Because what I have is just a big pile of stuff to be shredded. And then you do it and it takes all day. Oh, I have a shredder in my office and I just walk over and... See, my office is outside. My shredder's in the basement. I'm not just near it anymore. No, you're not walking to it. I always process my mail in my office so it works. I do that. And if you want to see all of the errors in your application, you'll want to check out Sentry at sentry.io forward slash syntax. You don't want a production application out there that, well, you have no visibility into in case something is blowing up and you might not even know it. So head on over to sentry.io forward slash syntax. Again, we've been using this tool for a long time and it totally rules. All right. Okay, let's talk about email. I'm the worst at email because I get so much garbage that I can't find the actual good stuff out of it. And I've complained about this for a long time. I've tried setting up a whole bunch of AI rules and it all just doesn't work. I cannot figure out how to surface the email that matters to me. I get so much like slop, incoming AI, like cold emails and obviously I block it but they just spin up a new domain name but I need to figure out a system a to get less email you know I gotta figure out how to stop it from coming in the first place and be another system for just like dealing with it you know like I hate email and I I rarely go through I go like I scan it once or twice a day and see hopefully I catch the important stuff but sometimes stuff gets missed and I I don't love it I love inbox zero and I would love to help you get there. I've currently reached Inbox Zero for the last six weeks. I hit Inbox Zero 244 days of last year. Oh, man. Which means I have no emails in my inbox. Let me tell you, the key to Inbox Zero is to use your inbox as a to-do list. If it is in your inbox, you have to do something with it. If it is meaningless, you archive it, you get rid of it. If it's something you can do right now, you do it right now or you leave it for that part of the day where you can do it. If it's something you cannot do today, you snooze it. Bingo, bango. You do that. You never have an email. Like the most emails I ever have is when I wake up and there's like, you know, 12 emails in my inbox total. But like if you treat it like that, like truly like it's a to-do list, man, like not only do you feel lighter about it every day. Yeah. But for me personally it acts as like a to list another system like that that I can truly feel like I know where everything at I never guessing guessing right The things that are I need to accomplish or not accomplish So yeah It probably not on my part probably not an email problem. It's more of a, like, I don't feel like dealing with this right now. And then it just stacks up and then it, yeah, but then I, I do snooze it, but then it's true. Then I get so much, Like how many emails have I got today alone? And I aggressively block and unsubscribe from everything. And I have about 23 emails so far since midnight. And it's 12, 13 hours, which is not a lot. You know, I could probably blitzer those in five minutes. But I do it first thing every day. And then I close my email and I don't open it for the rest of the day. Unless I'm like expecting a back and forth. But I do it very first thing. And I do it like as part of my morning routine. I get into the office. I open up my inbox and I either snooze. I snooze things sometimes for like a week. I'll say, I can't deal with this now until next Wednesday. And you'll just snooze it for a week or whatever. My problem is that I like I sit down and I hopefully know what I'm going to work on. And it's I'm just getting into the code or I'm working on whatever project. And like that's my energy is the highest in the morning. And that's what I want to get. I don't want to fritter away my time fussing with emails, you know, especially because I feel like most of the emails are people just demanding my time when I don't owe them anything. You can get rid of them. Trash it. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Then they then they send follow ups. I'm just checking in. Did you see X, Y and Z about our stupid AI tool? Would you like to do a YouTube video for six dollars? Yeah, I do. I do. I do every single one and they spin up brand new domain names every single time. And I'm on some of the fastest ones because my email address is in the RSS feed. Those are the fastest ones you can get through, though, because you can just zoom right through them. You know, it's that's true. You don't have to read it. You just, you know, I like I know Superhuman was bought by Grammarly. I know it's an expensive tool. The thing I like about it, though, is that the whole thing can be keyboard navigation. and the key for getting rid of something is just E or something. So you can just look at your inbox, go like you're in one, and I can just hit E, the next one pop up, E, next one pop up, and E. You know, I'm not like having to click through the things or find the buttons or whatever. And that to me, it makes it really smooth. My tasks in general, I think everything in my life, I would like to have more minimal. I've done a good job of this with inbox zero as evidenced just now. But I do find my to-do system, as I mentioned before, things pile up. My systems allow for things to pile up sometimes. And I don't mean just to-dos and emails. I mean physical items sometimes. I got papers over here that pile up. I got another stack of papers over here that pile up. I hate papers so much. My file system on my computer. Yeah. Yeah. my file system on my computer and my NAS drive have just become a dumping ground of like, I'll organize this later. And I know like, there's gotta be some tools. I actually built a, I built some personal software for myself, Wes called file bro. And file bro, I don't necessarily trust it just yet, but it will hopefully solve some of these issues where you can build, it's like Hazel where you can build these kinds of like complex automations and then just have it buzz through and move your files around. I need to build in the ability to like undo before I really let this thing rip on my file system. But I could find like, all right, scan because it does transcripts too. So you could say, scan these video files. And anytime I mentioned the word level up tutorials, put it in the level up tutorials folder. Anytime I mentioned the name of the course, this is the name of the course, put in this and then I have these complex JSON workflow documents. Yeah, see, I did that with my email, and it was just, it's all in the edge cases, you know? It works. Oh, yeah. Like, 93% of the time, but it works just not often enough that you're- And I don't need this to work, like, automated for me every day. What I need this is to clean up the existing structure, because it is like, what I have is a giant pile of clothes, and what I need is those clothes to get folded and put it in the right drawer. So that way when I get a new piece of clothing, I don't just throw it in the pile and I have somewhere to put it. That is my problem. Yeah, systems, man. Minimalist. You need to get minimalist. That's a big problem of mine is that I love things. Not like physical things, but I love getting into hobbies. I love hardware and wires and Christmas lights and all of this stuff. And I would love to be minimalist, but I am way too enthusiastic about learning new things that I will not be able to do that. So I have many more systems as to like where this stuff goes so that I can go grab it. Like I have all these boxes of different wires and things and that's helped me so much. Yeah, I don't need to be minimalist, but I would like to be minimalist with my systems or organized just to say. Yeah. Here's one that I am going to get so much better at this year is getting faster at typing and more accurate at typing. You know, I feel like I just did a test and I'm at like 75 words a minute. I would love to be in like, like on a good day, 75, you know, and like, I wish I could be at maybe 90 words a minute and like very accurate as well. Do you have a type checking tool type typing tool yeah so i just asked on twitter and a bunch of people sent me there's one tool that will help you get better and it uses an algorithm based on like it sees what you're like what mistakes you are for mine is i'm using the wrong finger to press i you know i'm i'm using my pointer peter pointer to touch i and i should be using my middle finger do you want to do a live type yeah typing on the show right now let's do it because i one year from now i am going to figure out if it's my keyboard and or whatever i'm gonna i would like to do this too because i think i might be worse than you really no yes what um what is this okay i gotta sit down for this hold on ready this is it um yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna kick my mic away because I feel like it gets in the way even though I don't look at it. Okay, ready? Three, two, one, go. Woo! Woof. Alright, what'd you get? Oh, my dear. Unmute. Okay. man yeah so i i learned something about myself here is that when i was reading ahead of time i was better than when i was just typing at like like following the word and just typing the next word i saw if i like read and typed at a lag i i did better um how did you do i got 62 words a minute with 96 accuracy okay i did 58 words per minute with 96 oh you're pretty close we're pretty close then pretty close yeah i told you i'm not good not good like that's the problem is that i have a lot of accuracy problems and it's obnoxious when you're coding because totally then you got to go back especially with like curly brackets and things like that so i want to get up to like 90 words a minute and i think i can get there if you just if i just i don't know i asked on twitter people sent me this like a couple of websites to practice, but also I'm wondering if a keyboard, because I think my problem is that I'm touching the wrong keys. And that's not my problem. I'm using the wrong fingers. Yeah obviously that the problem you touching the wrong keys but I using the wrong fingers to go to the keys So if I maybe what if I moved to a new keyboard to just hard break those problems Will I be amazing? Can I get up to 90, 100 words a minute? Can I be amazing? And like, I use speech to text quite a bit, but there's still something so key about being a fast typer. Yeah, man, I don't know, man. That was a frustrating experience for me, but I would I would absolutely I think this is on my list as well it would be fun to redo this at the end of this year and see I do feel like my issue is just straight up typing the the next letter instead of like the current one I wonder like how much my dyslexia plays into here I'm not making excuses but I do wonder if if those reading challenges also matter but I know I could be way faster i don't know my i felt like i was cruising too and i wonder if like just fixing the accuracy issues increases the words per minute uh by a ton ah that was that was good so let us know down below what is your words per minute and how do we get better at this because i i want to be a machine you know bet ben vinegar types 150 140 words a minute and i don't know like that's that's so key in coding. The funny part about that is he would often think about what he was like typing in Slack like quite a bit. So you would see Ben is typing for so long because he's going back. I'm like, oh, maybe I should phrase that different. But first coding, so good. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Man. Yeah. I need to. It's the year of learning to type fast. Yeah. It's the year of learning to type fast. I love it. Cool. I agree with you on that one. I got to have that. Another thing I would like to do is continue listening to more like self-help book and personal advancement books, those types of things. I do and have always loved a good self-help book. My Audible is just a graveyard of self-help books, and I'll listen to any of them. I'll listen all the way through. It does not matter if I end up implementing any of the things. It gets me a bit of juice to implement change in my life. But I did find over the past year and things were stressful with me, with my my head injury and just like the amount I didn't feel like I had any room for personal growth, even though I was like I was doing a lot of healing. So I would love to get back into listening to a bunch of books. And I already have a whole bunch downloaded and ready to go that I downloaded legally off of whoever knows where you buy legal audiobooks dot com. but I would love to just re-implement that in life and listen to more books because I can fill my time with a lot of boring ass podcasts or you know see I much prefer the like interesting podcasts I used to be huge into audiobooks and I still am like I like the like Atomic Habits or whatever but I find a lot of these self-help books so cheesy you know I listen I listen to this like David Goggins you know everyone's crazy about how amazing this guy is And and like I'm just like listening to this and being like, yeah, this guy can like like obviously run marathons and break his legs and keep running. But like the rest of your life is in shambles, brother. You know, you have no good relationships. You're just hurting everybody in your life. Like all of this is at the cost of what? What? And like I'm not motivated by this. You know, like it's I find myself as the older I get, the less the more I find this stuff to be super cheesy. I don't know why that is. I don't think that I'm like becoming negative, but I just like I see through a lot of this stuff like, yeah, but like the rest of your life, you kind of sacrifice everything else in your life to get really good at running through the desert. I agree with that. But I still like some of those things. I think for me, like the thing that turns me off of one is like when something is super derivative of something else I've already listened to before, or you can tell it's just like a reworking of these other ideas that somebody else had. One of the things that I've been liking lately in books, especially about like technology, is like maybe like more history in stories about like real things and real history. They call that history. And I do think that like those things are inspiring to me in the same way that self-help books are. So maybe that's it too. Maybe I just like have reached the limit on I've listened to all of the good self-help books and need to listen to more history or more things that I actually want to spend time on. because I do love history personally. History and science. Maybe that's where I'm at as well. It's like I've listened to them all. I understand all of the to do whatever. I have a pretty good to do system and I understand the habits and everything. And it's similar to like coding as well. You know, like there's only so many tutorials you can do before you just got to go and do it. You know what I would like to do also, Wes? I would like to, and I actually built an app for this, not vibe coded, by the way. I built this by hand, not that it matters. But long term habits, where you have your daily habits and your like daily resolutions, things you want to do every single day. But there's like some things I would like to do once a month. So I built like an app where you can say, remind me to do this thing every four months, or remind me to do this thing every three months. And then like, it just has like a feed and it pops up and it says like, all right, you have two months until you have to do this again. And And you could just kind of always see that what's at the top to these things that like that way you can make sure that you're like staying on top of either relationships you want to cultivate, like professional relationships. Like, oh, my, you know, there's a buddy of mine, I haven't talked to him in months. Like one of those things could just be like send so and so a message because, you know, life gets busy. And just stuff like that. You know, I would love to develop and improve that system. or what I should do is I should take that long-term kind of habits, like things that only happen several times a year and just put that in my habit tracker app. Just put it in that so that way I don't have two surfaces. I'm already looking at the habit tracker app every day. Oh, here's one. I would like to ship more things. I have a real big problem of starting a lot of things and not finishing them. I think we all do. Yes. I would love to ship some things. I have a video recording app that hopefully by the time you're listening to this has been shipped. I actually have it signed by my Apple developers account. And I would like to get in the hands of people like Wes to test it. So that way I can actually ship it because I'm using it right now. And you know what? It does me no good to just write this thing and have myself use it. I could put it up online and have other people use it as well. So I got a ship. I got a ship this year. Me too. You make so many fun things and then you get unexcited about it. And then you just like I actually finish it and I use it. But like that extra 10% of like actually pushing it out there so other people can use it and enjoy it. That's the hardest part. Is kind of key. Yeah. And then on top of it, actually making a video about it. Like I made this cool sticker printer thing that like prints stickers based on AI. and that worked that did super well on twitter and in short form content but i was like i should really make a i posted the code a bunch of people are using it but i didn't make a video on it i should make a video about that wes i'm demanding it because i like that i want to see what you did there and i want to do it myself all right so that's all i got what kind of habits would you like to cultivate in your life this year what types of things would you like to change and how are you doing that what's your systems like to do's what's your systems like for habits all this stuff books that you like that you think we might like love all of that stuff and more so hit us up with that information the comments uh twitter facebook whatever hit us up we'd love to hear from you as always we'll catch you in the next one peace peace