My Foundations Project Is Now Complete

One year ago, I started a project to improve the foundations for my life. Each month, I picked a theme, and read books and worked on new habits and practices to support that foundation. Today, I’d like to step back and look at how the project went as a whole.

I’ve already done updates for each of the twelve foundations, which you are welcome to check out here: Fitness, Productivity, Money, Food, Reading, Outreach, Sleep, Reflection, Connection, Focus, Organization and Service. I also summarized some key lessons from the 102 books I read as part of the project here.

The Year as a Whole

Overall, I’m pleased with how the year went. I made improvements in nearly all of the twelve foundations I tackled. For some the changes were relatively minor, but in others they were dramatic.



Beyond the specific improvements, though, the project left me feeling generally happier than before I began. It’s hard to pin down the bump in overall well-being to any specific habit change. Rather, I think making small upgrades across many areas of my life has generally contributed to feeling more relaxed, happy and engaged.

Personally, this bump in well-being is the most important outcome of the project, but it’s a subjective measure that’s prone to bias. Therefore, I’d like to be a bit more objective, spelling out for each foundation the concrete changes I managed to stick with through the year’s end.


My Quick Stats for Each Foundation

Focusing only on objective metrics, here are the changes I made in each foundation for the year:

1. Fitness. I did a basic fitness test at the start of the year-long project, then again halfway through the year, and another at the end. This test included doing the 1.5-mile run test as a proxy for VO2 max, as well as counting the number of consecutive push-ups and pull-ups I could do.
   • 1.5-mile run test:
     • Jul 2024: time: 11:00; estimated VO2 max: 47.4
     • Dec 2024: time 9:20; estimated VO2 max: 55.3
     • Jul 2025: time: 10:28; estimated VO2 max: 49.6
   • Consecutive pull-ups:
     • Jul 2024: 3
     • Dec 2024: 10
     • Jul 2025: 10
   • Consecutive push-ups:
     • Jul 2024: 24
     • Dec 2024: 49
     • Jul 2025: 50
   • I also completed my first marathon in May.
2. Productivity. I adopted a shared calendar and to-do list system with my wife to help in coordinating events, which had been lacking prior to this project.
3. Money. I set up registered education savings plans for my kids and got term life insurance. Saving, investing and expense tracking were already solid habits prior to this project.
4. Food. I lost 13 lb., going from a high of 177 lb. to 164 lb., which I’ve sustained for six months.
5. Reading. I finished 102 books for the project in the past year (reading 105 books in total).
6. Outreach. I set up a system of reminders for reaching out to old friends.
7. Sleep. According to my Fitbit, my average nightly sleep went from 6 hours and 47 minutes, for the six months prior to the Sleep month, to 7 hours and 12 minutes for the seven months since, an increase of 25 minutes.
8. Reflection. I restarted my journaling habit and have made nearly 100 entries in the past five months.
9. Connection. I maintained no-phone time for family dinners, although I did not reach my intended goal of clear no-phone boundaries for all time at home.
10. Focus. I started using the daily highlight method taught in Make Time. But, generally speaking, focus has usually been a strength of mine, so I didn’t see significant differences in deep work hours.
11. Organization. I decluttered all my personal possessions at home and at the office. I fell short of a complete house declutter, however, with kids’ stuff and some communal items remaining. Still, I achieved my goal of organizing my private spaces and finding a place for my personal things.
12. Service. I donated blood and made financial contributions to charities, both lump-sum and recurring.

Qualitatively speaking, I feel my health foundations had the most dramatic improvements, with minor improvements in Productivity, Money, Service and Organization. Reading and Focus were already strong, so they were fairly steady.



Outreach was probably my least successful month as, aside from some tweaks to my productivity system, I didn’t make any noticeable increases in my broader socializing. While Connection and Reflection were beneficial months, I have slipped somewhat on the habits I had initially cultivated.

My Biggest Takeaways

I learned a lot from the books I read this year, but I learned just as much from the process of trying to make and sustain behavior changes. Here are some of the biggest takeaways I got from the process:

1. Habits are temporary; for change to last you need to change your attitudes. I started with a very consistent fitness habit. I still exercise every day, but I don’t follow my original routine. What changed was a switch in both the priority I gave to exercising in my life, as well as how much I enjoyed it and how much it was integrated into my interests. Any particular habit is ultimately just a vehicle for getting you to a place where sustaining a behavior is intrinsically motivating for you.
2. Problems are much easier to solve when you make them the priority. Many of my sticking-point foundations (Sleep, Fitness, Organization) became easy when they became the priority for the month. Too often, we let problems linger because we never devote enough focused attention to resolving them.
3. Individually, the foundations are easy, but collectively they’re hard. On the flip side, when you’re focusing on a foundation it’s usually easy to make improvements, but it’s tricky to sustain habits across the board as months go on. Twelve different areas (not to mention your other goals and responsibilities!) makes juggling everything tricky, even if any individual ball isn’t too heavy.
4. It’s very rare that there’s “nothing you can do.” Pessimism is common when dealing with a difficult foundation, but it’s exceedingly rare that there’s literally nothing you can do to make it better. I began working on my Sleep foundation with a lot of pessimism owing to the unpredictable sleep patterns of my young kids—but I did actually manage to make significant improvements that month.
5. Good enough is underrated. While we all admire top performers, those rare people who reach a vaunted ideal in some aspect of life, for most of us doing the minimum across a wide range of activities is actually more important.
6. You need to involve the people in your life. Every single foundation involved my wife in some way. Sometimes that was direct, such as coordinating our expense tracking, decluttering the house, or connecting over conversations. But often it was indirect, like finding times when we could both exercise, or finding food to cook that met our standards while also being palatable for the kids.

At a more general level, I think the biggest takeaway is simply that it is possible to make major, sustained improvements to your life across many areas. Contrary to widespread belief (including my own), it is possible to find an equilibrium in life where your health, career, relationships and mental well-being are all good.

Interested in Joining Me for a Second Round?

Despite its length, the project was actually pretty fast-paced. There were many ideas I didn’t have a chance to explore fully in the time I allotted, and many more changes that didn’t quite reach that self-sustaining equilibrium I would have liked.

Therefore, I’m planning on going through the project again for a second time. This second pass is going to be more low-key, since I’ve already done the research and won’t need to craft new lessons for the companion course.


But I’m hoping to use the opportunity to focus on each foundation for another month as a way of deepening some of the habits I began in the first round and pushing myself to new challenges. I’ll skip posting most of these updates to the blog, but I’ll share some experiences in the community for the companion course.

If you’ve been following my project over the past year and are interested in taking on the challenge yourself, I’m happy to announce we’ll be holding our second session, with registration starting on October 17th. If you’re interested in joining, you can put your name in on the waiting list!