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It is time for one of my favorite episodes to do, and the first official episode of the year.

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It is my yearly theme episode.

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Hey everybody, and welcome to the Streamlined Solopreneur, where I help small business owners grow without burning out through

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Simple, powerful online systems.

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But beyond that, I help you create better relationships.

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Without losing the humanizing factors of your business to scale.

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And I say that now because I spent a bunch of time over break reflecting.

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But I also think it strongly ties in to my yearly theme, which if you saw the title of this episode, you’ll know it is the year of digital detox.

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There comes a time in everyone’s life when they’ve consumed too much of something, and they find the very notion of consuming more sickening.

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This could be the college student who drank too much vodka and can’t have it anymore, or the person who ate far too much sushi and got sick and is now repulsed by it.

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Someone who’s seen a movie or TV show so many times that they just pick it apart now.

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Or someone who realized their favorite author just regurgitates the same ideas over and over again.

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Beyond overconsumption, sometimes our priorities, tastes, or desires shift.

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I used to play video games every day.

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I told myself there would never come a time where I would stop playing video games daily.

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But now that ritual is basically reserved for long breaks.

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Over Christmas break, I played a classic, Call of Duty 2.

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My brother Robbie used to drink Coke almost exclusively, and while he still enjoys the occasional Coca-Cola, he opts to drink water most of the time, because now he’s prioritized.

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His health.

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I’m getting a little sick of technology.

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I consider myself a technologist.

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I’ve always been an early adopter.

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I had one of the first digital notebooks, the Logitech I.

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O.

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, where the pen was massive because it had a small camera in it.

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I had a foldable laptop and tablet in 2005.

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Five full years before the iPad came out.

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I was on Facebook as soon as I could be and Twitter less than a year after it launched.

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Back when you had to text it to tweet from your phone because there was no iPhone, let alone an app for Twitter.

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All of this is to say that I’m not anti-technology, not even close.

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But I’m getting a little sick of the constant connection.

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I have other priorities, and as I’ve learned from my year of being present, I’m ready to do something about it.

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So this year is the year of digital detox.

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I want to reduce my reliance on connected technology.

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Do more in the real world.

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And focus on actually doing, not having AI do it for me, and connecting with real relationships, not transactional ones

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This is definitely the sequel to last year’s theme.

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So let’s grade that first.

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Grading the year of being present.

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After coming off the utter failure that was, or really was not, the year of control.

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I was extra motivated to make 2025’s yearly theme work.

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By the way, there will be links to the written version of this episode, as well as blog posts for all of my yearly themes.

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in the description or over at streamlined.

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fm.

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So I was extra motivated to make 2025’s yearly theme work.

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How did I do overall?

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Since moving away from the craft app two years ago, I stopped with the good okay bad rubric.

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And 2024 was so bad I didn’t need to actually track my goals that I know I failed.

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But I did want to bring some sort of grading back this year, so I decided to weight my goals and grade each one.

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Then assign myself an overall grade.

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And full disclosure, I did use Chat GPT to help calculate the weighted grade, even though I taught in college.

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It was never something I was actually good at

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Uh but first let’s give a quick assessment of the yearly theme.

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There were a few things I said I’d do that I didn’t end up doing.

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I abandoned the weekly, monthly, and quarterly prompts as they felt forced.

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Those were also thought of by ChatGPT and I just didn’t really feel connected to them.

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I didn’t call my parents every other day like I promised, but we did visit them more often, even though they now live further away.

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And I can’t say I did more friend trips, but I did see more friends this year.

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Or last year, I guess

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As for the overarching goals, the first was reduced screen time.

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I think I did this pretty well.

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I got rid of most social media and all social media apps from my phone.

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But I did find myself at times mindlessly checking email.

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I was also inconsistent about bricking my phone, something that I loved and was really motivated to do at the beginning of 2025.

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I would say on balance though I used both my phone and my computer less.

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Number two, creating stronger boundaries.

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Overall, I feel like this

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This is where I advanced my yearly theme the most.

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I didn’t bring my laptop on family vacations, and I didn’t work when I said I wasn’t going to work.

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We also implemented a timer trick that Amanda Getz recommended in episode 498, I believe it was.

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uh that she recommended to me to tell kids to to set a timer, to tell my kids to set a timer.

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And no matter what, I would be done working when it went off.

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When I asked my oldest daughter

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If she felt like I was more successful in being present this year, she said yes without hesitation and then cited that timer trick.

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Number three, stop doing other stuff on calls.

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Uh this is specifically Zoom or video calls on my computer.

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I don’t really feel like I did great at this.

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I think I did better than the previous year, but I didn’t really form a long term habit or implement a process to ensure

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I’d be more present on those calls.

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That said, I definitely was more mindful when my attention wandered and snapped back to attention because of it.

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So just the mere

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thought of wanting to do this more forced me to do it more.

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Though I I definitely could have done it better.

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Number four, stop deferring to the future.

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This one is hard to quantify because the guidance was pretty vague.

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Uh and I generally bias towards action anyway.

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You know, uh my wife will not come to me with problems if I’m in the middle of something because she knows I will stop what I’m doing to try to solve that problem.

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But I do say things like, or I did say things like, that’s a problem for future Joe.

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I would say the biggest win here is getting my type 2 diabetes back under control in my favorites of 2025 episode.

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I mentioned my favorite tech was my continuous glucose monitor and that it was truly life-changing.

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And that’s absolutely true.

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I also did more kind of justice stuff, not letting bigger institutions take advantage of me.

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Uh a big seven-month-long battle was getting my money back from StubHub for a concert that was canceled that they refused to refund me for.

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Maybe I’ll tell that story in an audio note.

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Um, I also called my congressional representatives more, and I pushed bigger societal issues at school.

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uh in my position as uh uh PTO president.

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So um I I think I am trying to solve more problems.

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I think 2025 uh was a year that felt

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uh politically unstable, do take that statement with what you will.

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But um I, you know, I was not happy with a lot of things, and I felt like I was more vocal about those things.

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So uh number five, always have cash.

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This one was mostly a failure.

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Uh one problem I never ended up solving.

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uh was that I got a new ATM card and I forgot my pin.

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Uh I feel out of principle.

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I shouldn’t have to go to the bank to change my ATM pin.

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Uh and so I never changed it.

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Which means that I was hindered every time I went to the ATM because I couldn’t get cash out of it.

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It’s a problem that I’ll solve after recording this.

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And then the last goal was to manage assumptions.

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This is a consummate struggle for me.

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I feel like at times I was more combative.

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assuming the worst in people.

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In general, I think that these assumptions help me discern bad behavior and threats.

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However, I don’t just apply those assumptions out of fear or situations directly affecting me, and that’s made me cynical.

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Over the course of the year, I think I got better at letting stuff go and not always assuming people were doing things out of selfishness.

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The way that this was supposed to help me be more present was to be more present in the things I was doing and not always worry about what other people were doing.

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I’ve started reading Ryan Holiday a lot more, and maybe I’ll talk about this when I talk about my yearly theme, but uh I I’m trying to get back to those stoic roots of

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uh of doing things that affect me and re- you know, I can’t control how people act.

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I can only control how I react.

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Uh so I’m trying to get to more of that.

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But

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Overall, let’s get to the grade.

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I’d say I’d give myself a B plus here.

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Over the course of the year, I formed long-term habits that made a positive impact on my life.

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I also made several changes for the betterment of my physical and mental health.

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But I wasn’t perfect and the grade reflects that.

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There are places for me to improve.

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And so uh I’ll read through this.

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This is this table is linked in the in the description in the show notes.

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Um, but as far as the grades breakdown.

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Reduce screen time, I gave myself a B and I weighted that at 30%.

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Create stronger boundaries.

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I gave myself an A and weighted that at 25%.

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When I’m all caught when I’m on calls, stop doing other stuff was a C, which I weighted at 10%.

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Stop deferring to the future was a B plus I weighted at 15%.

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Always have cash was a D that I weighted at 5%

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And manage assumptions, I gave myself a B minus, which was weighted at 15%, so the math works out to B plus.

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This is my best grade since the 2022 year of retreat and a huge bounce back from the F I gave myself for the year of control.

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Part of what made my yearly theme so successful was that I learned a few crucial lessons that led to my 2026 theme.

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So what did I learn from the year of being present

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The first biggest lesson is that I don’t need social media for anything.

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I don’t need it to grow my business.

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I don’t need it for news.

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I don’t need it to stay connected to the people who matter most to me.

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After leaving Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and threads, I’m left with just LinkedIn and Blue Sky.

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The only thing I really miss is baseball Twitter, and Blue Sky is doing an okay job of filling that void.

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Check out my other podcast, Paper and Smoke, for a deeper dive on my thoughts about social media.

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The next is that you can and should lock off log off of work for an extended period of time.

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Very few things in my work life constitute an emergency.

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I have designed it that way.

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By communicating clearly with my clients, the people I work with, and other folks in my professional life, I could reasonably shut down without worry.

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In fact, there were four weeks in twenty twenty five where I was pretty much completely offline.

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The first was when we went to Disney World, which is which which was a great success.

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I didn’t bring my laptop.

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I bricked my phone.

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I barely checked email.

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The only reason I checked email actually was so that I wouldn’t come home to like 600 unread emails.

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I didn’t send a single email while I was in Florida.

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The second is the week of Thanksgiving where we visited my parents upstate and so I did not do any work while I was there.

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And then the last two weeks of the year that’s

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Christmas and New Year’s, where I created a single sponsor video at terms I deemed very much worth it.

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I also did some writing.

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You can’t uh stop the inspiration train once it strikes, and I did want to take some time to myself.

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My kids were off for 17 days.

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Uh, and my wife still had to work.

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And so uh I did take some time to myself and I used that time to write, which I thoroughly enjoy, but I wasn’t on the hook to anybody else for anything else.

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It’s no exaggeration to say that these four weeks were uh did wonders.

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For my mental health.

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And it definitely, they definitely helped me be more present with my kids.

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One great rule that I implemented here.

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Is no phone at the gym.

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I downloaded playlists onto my Apple Watch and connected my AirPods directly to that watch.

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And then I either left my phone in the car or a locker, uh, because Planet Fitness doesn’t they require your app to scan in at the gym, which is annoying.

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Uh, they should at the very least uh either allow keychain barcodes or make an Apple Watch app.

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Uh that coupled with my fitness focus mode means that I only get the most crucial notifications, that from my kids school or my wife.

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And this brings me to my final lesson, which is uh I don’t need my phone as much as I thought I did.

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I spent a lot of time over the course of 2025 optimizing my phone for its most crucial, crucial functions.

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Communication, idea capture, and memory assisting.

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While I still use it for reading articles or watching YouTube, I consume much, much less content on it and I am better off for it.

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I only get breaking news notifications three times per day.

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Very few apps at all can actually notify me.

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This is the way.

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And these lessons are why I decided to parlay my year of being present into my 2026 yearly theme: the year of digital detox.

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If you couldn’t tell, far and away my favorite result of the year of being present is that I finally cut off most social media.

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I have an article coming out, I already alluded to this, on my new publication, Paper and Smoke, where I spent

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2,000 plus words talking about it.

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I also recorded a podcast episode about it, so you can subscribe to Paper and Smoke wherever you’re listening to this.

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But over the summer, I also mused about uh the fact that I was worried about losing my critical thinking skills through the overuse of large language models.

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I’ve been using them basically since ChatGPT launched in December 2022, but I fell into the trap of letting it do too much for me.

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I even let it plan my yearly theme last year.

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While I thought it did a good job of surfacing some aspects I didn’t think of, I don’t feel I was as committed to those aspects because I didn’t think of them.

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They were just kind of like the average answers given the prompt.

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Thankfully, I realized this and my already help healthy skepticism of AI took over.

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What kicked all of this off for me, though, was The Anxious Generation, a great book that I read in April

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It had such a profound effect on me that it set everything else in motion from leaving social media, which I had already left Twitter, but.

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I didn’t really intend on leaving the other ones.

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Uh, to having that healthy skeptic uh skepticism of AI and imparting my thoughts to the greater school community and my children.

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As a result, I want to do as much digital detox as possible in 2026.

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Here’s the gist, the one-liner, the thesis of my yearly theme.

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Continue the trend of less social media.

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Do more with the physical world.

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This is a pretty simple charge, I think, but with big ramifications.

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It’s also kind of vague, so I created some goals that are more concrete and instructive.

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There are two big themes.

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The first is use my devices less.

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I have a lot of devices.

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As I mentioned, one of them, my CGM, is life-changing.

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But I’ve come to rely on my devices in a worrying way.

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Much like when I was using ChatGPT for everything, I worry that I’m losing real tangible skills by outsourcing them to technology.

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In my AI manifesto, which I will also link in the show notes, I wrote that we risk becoming tourists in our own lives.

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That Wally is becoming a cautionary tale.

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This part of my digital detox is crucial for preventing that.

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So here’s how I’ll do it.

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I want to leave my phone in the car more or at home more.

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I don’t want to be tethered to my phone or even the outside world as much.

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Or the outside world that’s not directly in front of me is maybe a better way.

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to put it.

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I want to be present where I am, not distracted by things that are not in front of me.

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I already leave it in my car when I go to church or the gym, and I basically turned it into a camera and walkie talkie at Disney World.

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I want to leave it behind more often.

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I have my Apple Watch Ultra 3 for communication.

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I can get texts, take phone calls, and listen to music on it.

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The battery life is great and I get far fewer notifications on it than my phone.

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I also purchased the DJI Osmo Action 6, which is a great portable video camera that also takes photos.

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When I feel like I want to take photos, I’ll have that on me when I don’t want to have my phone.

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The only hiccup is that my CGM, that life-changing technology from last year, relies on my phone.

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But I also don’t need it as much as a type 1 diabetic does.

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I don’t need the constant readout of my blood sugar.

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And leaving my phone in the car doesn’t mean I’ll never have it on me.

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It just means I don’t have it on me when it will be too much of a distraction.

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That means that I’m not leaving it at my house for an entire day, but on shorter trips.

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Like shorter day trips, I should say

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Next is I want to use more e-ink devices.

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Uh I want to uh embrace the idea of e-ink.

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I love the idea of e-ink, a digital way to have an analog experience.

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My phone, my iPad, and my laptop are all distraction devices.

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I can access anything, which makes it hard to do focused work.

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There’s something great about having a device that is focused on one task, that doesn’t refresh as often, that can’t get push notifications.

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And I should say here that I love the idea of like an e-ink writing device, but I do use a lot of different apps.

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for writing.

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I do a lot of research and and and I check a lot of but uh resources and stuff like that.

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And so I’m not going to get an e-ink writing device.

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I have opted to use my iPad more because it is less of a distraction device than my laptop.

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It’s a lot more focused, but that’s just an aside I wanted to mention here.

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I also want to rely on GPS more.

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Something I feel a little ashamed of is the fact that I rely on GPS far too much.

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Like for simply driving around town.

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I tell myself that it gives me real-time traffic data, which is why I use it.

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But the truth is I don’t know how to get around the place I live as well as a nine-year resident should.

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When I was a kid and we moved, my dad would take us out and just drive around to get to know the area.

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No maps, no devices, just the road and a waypoint to eventually get back home.

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Sometimes we’d get lost and that’s okay.

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We were never truly lost, after all.

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Part of the reason I use GPS too much is also efficiency.

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I don’t want to get lost.

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I don’t want to waste any time.

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I want to get to where I need to get as quickly as possible with no minutes wasted.

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But it’s okay to waste some minutes to take the long road, to uh just waste a little bit of time.

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I don’t want to live a life of no margin.

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And so I’m going to use GPS less, even if it means it takes me longer to get somewhere.

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Finally, I have turned off the symptoms radar on my aura ring.

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I love my aura ring.

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It’s had a net positive effect on me

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It helps me sleep better and much like my CGM, it gives me insights into how food affects me, which is really important.

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But I also noticed that if it said I was getting sick, I was more likely to believe I was sick, even if I personally felt fine.

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The symptoms radar takes a number of signals from biometric sensors in the ring and then guesses if something is straining, quote unquote, your body, which is most associated, in my opinion, at least, with getting sick.

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Sometimes this can be a canary in the coal mine, but more often I would let it dictate how I felt.

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So I’ve turned it off.

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I like having the readiness score and understanding how I slept.

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But I think doing a check-in with myself to see how I feel is better than having a computer on my finger tell me how I feel.

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Reducing my use and reliance on technology is important, but it is only one aspect of my yearly theme.

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The other has to do with actually living in the analog world

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I often joke that without computers, I’d have no marketable skills.

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This is hopefully obviously not true, but it feels like that sometimes.

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The first time I realized I didn’t know a whole lot outside of my area of expertise was around 2011.

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All of my friends knew other things, other things outside of their areas of expertise.

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Worse is that we all went to the University of Scranton, a liberal arts school that emphasized this sort of learning, learning outside of our expertise, so much that we were forced to take at least one philosophy class per year.

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I had clearly squandered that side of my education.

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This is even more proof in the fact that I’m reading more philosophy and about the Stoics and

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names of uh people that I brushed off when I was a uh know-it-all 18-year-old are coming back up and I’m really mad at myself for wasting that side of of my education.

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But since then, I have made a concerted effort to learn more outside of computer science and business.

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Today, fifteen years later, I think I’m a much more well-rounded individual

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But I still don’t know how a lot of stuff works or how it came to be.

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Something else I’ve been doing a lot more of in the last two years is reading fewer business books, and this is related, I’ll tell you why in a second.

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Uh since my 2023 moratorium on business books, I’ve made an effort to read a less homogeneous group of books.

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Of the 30 I logged reading, 80 were business books, five were deeply disappointing, and one is the worst I’ve read in recent history.

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That is this is strategy by Seth Godin, if you’re wondering.

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I feel like I got duped into buying uh a printed and bound version of of blog posts.

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Uh so reading more about stuff outside of my area of expertise and the continued moratorium on business books will be a core tenet of my year of digital detox.

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More specifically, I want to read older books, more philosophy and biographies.

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Last year I listened to a podcast, The Dispatch, uh, where Ryan Holliday was on and he said this.

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If I think back, I can’t remember a single news article I read 10 years ago.

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But my life was pro ch profoundly changed by the books I read 10 years ago.

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He goes on to say that people are just consuming way too much contemporary information, not enough information that’s designed first and foremost to be worth paying for now.

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Uh and so

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It was a response to a question on how to deal with all the bad news of the day, and it really resonated with me.

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I found myself angered over the headlines, even though they were only pushed to me occasionally.

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He went on to say that there are so many books that are hundreds or even thousands of years old that can have a profound effect on us.

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They were written for long-term impact, not short-term clicks.

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And I want to read more of those books.

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On top of that, I want to learn about how more of my favorite things are actually made.

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So I want to read books about doing things in the real world.

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How is coffee roasted?

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What’s the process for blending tobacco into a cigar?

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How do you mix the perfect cocktail?

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What makes jazz music different from rock music on a technical level?

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Maybe this is an overcorrection from a year where AI took a massive leap in usage.

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It has become ubiquitous in our society, and I fear it has many negative ramifications.

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For understanding and appreciating the craft of actually doing the work.

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AI can do stuff for us, but AI doesn’t appreciate the craft.

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It doesn’t do stuff for us particularly well.

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And as a result, we’re not as committed to it.

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With that in mind, I’ve decided to start a new publication, which I’ve alluded to called Paper and Smoke.

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It’s over at paperandsmoke.

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com and wherever you listen to podcasts.

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It’s charge.

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In fact, its inception has come out of my yearly theme: write about doing real-world craft.

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The name comes from my love of analogue hobbies writing with a pen and paper, smoking cigars, drinking coffee, real, tangible things that require time and patience to craft.

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There is no AI-generated roadmap this year.

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I didn’t use AI to generate a roadmap for my yearly theme because in the long run I didn’t use last year’s.

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I didn’t like it as much as I initially thought, and I didn’t feel right to rely on AI for my year of digital detox.

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Instead, paper and smoke will be my accountability.

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I have a loose idea of how I’ll implement my weekly writing schedule, getting in there a mix of accountability updates, history lessons, how something is made, or helpful non-tech analog or e-ink tools.

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I don’t have a specific format that I’ll need to follow exactly.

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Consistency will be better than rigidity here.

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But the format that I have or those four things that I mentioned are a starting point, and I’m excited to see how they evolve.

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Like last year, I am full of optimism, highly motivated.

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I’m excited to see where the year of digital detox takes me, and even more excited to share the journey with you.

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And now I’d love for you to share your resolution word yearly theme with me.

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What are you working on in 2026?

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You can head over to streamlinedfeedback.

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com, streamlined withadfeedback.

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com.

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To submit a voice note or via the form, you can submit some text.

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You can do it anonymously.

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And uh perhaps I’ll read it out on the show in an upcoming feedback episode.

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But that’s it for this episode.

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Thanks so much for listening.

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And until next time, I hope you find some space in your week.