Weekend Engagement - Looking Forward To 2026

List three things you're going to do better in 2026 that will improve the year over what you achieved in 2025 and explain.

It's been 3 weeks since my last Weekend Engagement post! To explain my absence, it's a combination of finding the time, as well as having sufficient thoughts on the suggested prompts for the week. Sometimes, I don't feel strongly and don't have perspectives to write about, and I guess that's fine. I don't need to "force" myself to squeeze out something from my brain. Hahaha.

This week, it's more of a self reflection prompt, I really took some effort to sit down and think about the three things. The first two came quickly, but the last one took some time. Maybe I just don't juggle so many things at the same thing and my life is just too simple (and boring haha). Alright, let's go!

First of all, I am going to do better for my health!

Health encompasses many things. It can range from getting more rest and sleep, to watching my diet and cutting down on oily food and sugary drinks, to being more active in getting more steps and doing more exercises. I decided to step up this year because as we age, our metabolism slows, and if I don't any changes, it's not going to be good. Another trigger was also my annual health report, which gave me enough minor alarm bells to further step up, to watch my health indicators like weight, body fat, blood pressure, cholesterol levels.

On one hand, I was heartened (and fortunate) that I have already stepped up since the start of the year. But on the other hand, I think I still need to do a lot more.

• As of today, I had clocked 63 gym sessions this year (that's more than once per week)
• For 2025, I have clocked 2.8m steps, averaging 8,042 steps per day. That's 11% more than 2024.

To be honest, even if results might not show up as much in the reports or the weighing scale, I think I am quite proud that I managed to achieve so much amidst all the busy commitments and conflicting schedules. I really gave it all. And of course, for 2026, I will continue to find more time to be active, to gradually adjust my diet, and improve my health in general.

Second, I am going to be better in leveraging the usage of AI in my life.

While some people have frowned upon the existence of the AI tools like ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini etc, I think it's actually about how you use these tools. Just like weapons, or more recently social media, there are always two sides to everything. If you use weapons well, you can defend your country. But if you abuse them, then you hurt the innocent. And some businesses have made use of social media to improve their outreach, but at the same time, you have people who suffer from addiction.

And these AI tools are the same. This year, I have used them so extensively and here are some of my examples:

• Planning travel itineraries for my trips (the best part is you can keep asking them to refine to your liking and interests)
• Finding nice food places (great if you are in a new area, and you have dietary requirements and budget constraints, just let them know)
• Random stuff like how many hours to make a cold brew tea (I didn't know different types of tea has different optimal timings)
• Summarise long articles and/or simplify legal jargon so that I can understand better (a lot of time savings especially in this age where this is information overload)

Aside from personal life, I have also used AI tools extensively at work as well. There are many use cases, of course, the tools are not perfect (and we always need to verify the output), it is a good starting point and there are definitely time savings.

So for 2026, I hope to leverage more of these AI tools in more aspects of my life, be it at work or outside of work. Of course, we all know we are not supposed to use them to write Hive posts. So don't worry about that - remember my earlier point about using it in the right way and not abusing it.

Finally, (the one that took a while to think), I am going to get to know myself better!

This is something that is not quite tangible, but this wasn't so apparent when I was much younger. In the past, it was just all those personality tests. The personality tests were useful as a starting point, to know my strengths and vulnerabilities, but I think what was missing was connecting with my inner self and being comfortable with myself.

Over the years, which included 2025, I think I have grown to know myself better, things like, what my ideal life is (and thereafter I can plan to work towards it), what I enjoy and what I can't stand (different people have their unique preferences and stuff that irks them), and this enabled me to better communicate with people around me, and I would say the shared understanding has helped to create a more harmonious relationship with people around me. Also, knowing myself better have also helped me to better manage my moods, my bad days, and the enabled me to be more resilient mentally and bounce back faster.

For 2026, I hope to continue to work on this front, and I suppose it's always a work in progress as long as I am alive! Haha. While it's not really measurable, I hope that through this process, I can be better focus on the things that matter, better prioritise my stuff, as well as to be more decisive in my decision making process (I still tend to overthink a lot).

So there you have it! Didn't expect it to be longer than usual but it's a serious and meaningful prompt so it is all it is! Weekends are always a good time for chilling and having desserts, so here's my contribution this week. An awesome slice of tiramisu paired with my favourite matcha latte!

Thanks for reading!