Priority List for 2025

I've been feeling really good about the priority list that I'm bringing into 2025 with me. So good in fact, that I've been able to pretty much narrow it down to a list that I can recite in my head or out loud to myself or others, depending on the situation. The priority list is as follows:

1. If after midnight, sleep. If before midnight, work on your commonbase.
2. Work on bramadams.dev. I'm of the strong opinion that personal websites are going to become really important in the continued increase of real world culture from the internet, as well as being able to exist in a language model world. And they're just really fun.
3. Mental, physical, and home cleaning. This basically means cleaning up my physical space, cleaning up my mental space with meditation, working out, building a body to die in, etc.
4. If under 5 books of the month, read a book. If over 5 books of the month, work on a deliberate practice skill. Right now, this is drawing and a little bit of creative coding.

This priority list has served me pretty well because it's fast enough that I can go through really quickly in my head. It has a few conditionals that make it easier to decide which is more important.

And if I really go through all four and don't do want to do, then I can just easily reference back to doing what I want to do (which might be watching TV or doing something a little bit more laissez-faire).

But I often notice that I end up wanting to do at least something on the priority list.

And these things align really well with my long-term goals.

In a similar vein, my values in 2025 are as follows: Agency, ambition, craft, collegiality, and solitude.

These five habits and values are things that I am striving towards / using as a baseline for judgment and decision making, particularly for the bigger decisions that I need to make in life.

I don't really know how I settled on these five, but these five resonate with me, and I think that resonance is probably a good enough signal as to whether or not something is a value that you believe in.

I think a value is something that you'd be willing to "die for," which means that you'd be willing to uproot huge amounts of your life to make these things a reality.

For example, with Agency and Ambition, I have already done that. I quit my job back in 2019 and have been on my own as an entrepreneur since, leaning into having Agency meaning no one is my boss, and Ambition by taking on really big, hard software projects as well as writing projects.

My craft is a little bit more untested than other people's crafts. I'm not trying to be the best at a art form that is hundreds of years old or has a lot of immediate and obvious competition.

To me, craft is being able to take the patterns that are in my mind and convey them through real computational data structures and effort, even though I'm learning along the way, sometimes there are a lot of compromises to be made.

Collegiality is something rather new for me. I've decided going forward that the types of friendships I want to foster are those that are strongly connected to communities and interest groups.

I don't have many people who I have on a daily rotation in my life. People that I hang out with just to spend time with. I've had those people in my life, and I'm really grateful for the times that we had together. But because of the other four values, particularly Solitude, I don't really have time to over-invest my needs into another person who I don't already have a prior investment to (be it through blood or previous friend relationships).

I think that this is OK. I think in a world where my goals are priority, and I desire to create with the time that I have on this planet, finding friends who are on the same journey as me and being really grateful for their time but then being able to move away from them when the time calls for it is beautiful.

This is an advantage of living in a huge city. I don't think I'd be able to pull this particular collegiality value off if I was in a smaller rural or small suburban area; there needs to be a certain density of a number of types of folks for this thing to work, which ties into the final value – solitude.

How do you deal with loneliness? What does it mean to be alone? For me, solitude is the act of being with yourself and the priority list above (specifically, reading books and meditation). Solitude to me means the ability to sit with yourself or do things with yourself to be okay with being bored. That's something that I need to work towards; it's not being antisocial and scrolling on your phone for hours on end. It's being grateful that you get to spend time with yourself and being agentic with the person that you are.

I placed the highest priority on the sort of life that lets me focus on writing, not associating with all the people around me. I felt that the indispensable relationship I should build in my life was not with a specific person, but with an unspecified number of readers. As long as I got my day-to-day life set so that each work was an improvement over the last, then many of my readers would welcome whatever life I chose for myself. Shouldn’t this be my duty as a novelist, and my top priority? My opinion hasn’t changed over the years. I can’t see my readers’ faces, so in a sense it’s a conceptual type of human relationship, but I’ve consistently considered this invisible, conceptual relationship to be the most important thing in my life. In other words, you can’t please everybody.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - Haruki Murakami and Philip Gabriel