Describe a goal you set yourself.

At the beginning of last year I decided to read thirty books, which is not an original goal and which I chose specifically because it was countable. I had spent the previous two years saying I did not have time to read, and I suspected that was untrue rather than impossible. What I did to achieve it was one change, which was to stop reading on my phone at night and put a book on the pillow instead, physically in the way. Everything else followed from that. I also gave myself explicit permission to abandon anything after forty pages, which turned out to matter enormously, because the real reason I had stopped reading was the guilt of half-finished books. How it turned out is that I read thirty-four, of which I abandoned nine, and about six were genuinely good. The useful discovery was not the number. It was that I had roughly forty minutes a day available and had been spending it on absolutely nothing. I have not set a number this year, because the number was scaffolding and the habit is now standing up without it.