Gratitude and Confetti

Happy Holiday season!

This year, I was able to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with my family north of Boston, after going to RubyConf Mini in Providence, RI. There I got to meet many of teammates in person for the first time. I’m super grateful for the experience, and even more grateful for the people I get to work with.

With all this travel, I was away from home in Austin for most of November. This December has become a time for reflection and reset for me, beginning with my routine and habits.

I feel better when I’m running, praying, rock climbing, expanding my knowledge, and meditating on a regular basis. Baking critical habits into a day, moving seamlessly between activities – that’s a productive, feel-good day.

In 2020, I used a habit tracker called Confetti to keep tabs on the habits I was looking to build on a daily basis. The app and website were simple, easy, and delightful. It worked well for me then, and I was held accountable for the habits I was developing.

After a year of using it, I figured that I was in a good enough place to stop tracking habits and simply do them every day. At that point, I didn’t want to gamify my routine so much. I continued those good habits for a while, but the eventual slide arrived (tellingly, I can’t remember when specific habits began to fall off).

Soo, I’m back to it! Confetti is a fantastic way for me to keep track of the meaningful habits to me, and it’s successfully reminding me to do them, too. If you’re looking to get serious about keeping track of your habits, but want a playful way to do it, check a habit tracker out. (I swear this isn’t sponsored 😅).

There are lots of fun projects in the works, and the holiday season is proving to be a great time to invest in them. I’m starting to develop a great accountability system, between Confetti and the incredible people in my life.

To close this letter, I’d like to share an off-the-dome list of things I’m grateful for.

• Family love

• My partner in life

• Adventures experienced in video games, books, board games, and tv shows

• The fact that people around me can also adventure into those worlds, and I can share that with them

• Writing code, writing poetry, writing this, and even writing emails

• Warm socks

• Warmer climates

• Friendships that transcend time and space

• Accountability buddies

• My brothers, who I would do anything for

• The affordances of technology which not only make life easier, but more interesting

• Airplanes (how magical is it that we can FLY?!)

• Soup

• Litmus, for being a kickass place to work

• Joyful technologies like Ruby

• Trees, mountains, beaches, and canyons

Do you keep track of habits in your life? Why or why not? If you use a habit tracker, what do you use?