968: Habits and Changes We Want to Make in 2026

Wes and Scott talk about setting realistic goals for the new year, building habits through small, sustainable changes, creating systems that actually stick, and why incremental progress beats big resolutions every time. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 00:26 Wes: Stand more 06:55 Wes: Learn to wake up early 10:04 Scott: Embrace daily TODOs Tweek 14:18 Brought to you by Sentry.io 14:43 Wes: Better email management 19:14 Scott: Become more minimal 22:13 Wes: Get faster at typing 26:55 Scott: Listen to more self-help books 30:18 Scott: Track long-term habits 31:36 Scott (and Wes): Ship more things Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Scott Tolinski?

  It's new year, new me, new us, new Wes, new Scott. We're going to be kicking off this year with the type of things that, well, we want to change in ourselves over the course of this year, but also how you can cultivate change in your life and the types of things that you are wanting to see out of yourself over the course of the year. Wes, my man, new year, new you. How's it going?

• 0:22Wes Bos?

  Good. We're recording this in December. Yes, standing. That's one of my goals this year. I've got the standing desk and I've forever been a standing desk hater because I say, I love the standing desk, simply because you can adjust it to be the perfect height for your sitting. You can adjust your chair till you feel good. And then you adjust your, your desk up and down so that it feels good as well. But there's gotta be something to, to the standing right now. So I'm, I'm feeling it right now. So I'm, I'm like, new year, new me. I'm going to, I'm going to be standing. I'm going to be trying to stand at least, what, what's a good amount of hours that you think I should be standing every week? To be not standing. As much as possible?

• 1:02Scott Tolinski?

  Get those legs some work. Get a little treadmill. Walk on that bad boy. Get them legs moving. Yeah. Do some squats. You can have your, here's, here's the, the power move. Uh, program your desk so that it automatically moves up and down. So you gotta squat with it.

• 1:17Wes Bos?

  That's so stupid. I have work to do.

• 1:22Scott Tolinski?

  Can you imagine?

• 1:24Wes Bos?

  Yeah. I, when you have these goals every year, you need to like, be like, we always talk about SMART goals, right? Which is like, it needs to be specific, attainable, measurable. I'm doing it in the wrong order.

• 1:36Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, they're smart.

• 1:38Wes Bos?

  Time-based. Yeah. So I think I'm going to try to stand for at least two hours a week, which is not a lot, but

• 1:46Scott Tolinski?

  No.

• 1:47Wes Bos?

  I hate standing. So here we go. Yeah.

• 1:49Scott Tolinski?

  There's a book I read, uh, last year or the year before about taking like one small step to make any change. I think it's Kaizen. Kaizen was the book. And it was about basically like anytime you're trying to cultivate a habit or a change or anything like that, start with like the smallest possible amount. Like Wes, I'm gonna stand for the first or I'm gonna stand for like a minute every single day. You're you're like the one thing that should be the easiest. I can stand for a minute. Okay, I can stand for 30 seconds a day. And then like slowly increase that or integrate it into your life and that makes learning these things a little bit easier.

• 2:30Scott Tolinski?

  But yeah, I do agree that as as cliche as that whole smart goals thing is, it is a good way. It works. It's cliche for a reason.

• 2:40Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah, it works. That works in like business or anything. Don't just be like, I want to do X, Y, and Z more. You have to have actual numbers around it so that you can measure if you hit them or not.

• 2:52Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I it is funny. So I think some people truly like believe that they are the way they are. And they are unable to greatly change or modify things in how they act or their life. And I think to some extent, yeah, that's that's true. But like, I think we all are capable of so much more than what we give ourselves credit for in terms of like really being able to enact change on ourselves and our processes and our systems by building in small habits and changing them and getting better about it and all kinds of stuff. And I personally, the types of things that work for me is like habit tracking.

• 3:33Scott Tolinski?

  I did build an app habitpath.io. I still use this app. It uses zero sync. It's local data. It's super duper fast. And I track so many habits in this thing. I even added like a feature, Wes, for tracking like my like daily levels of things like my sleep quality or my like irritability or something like that. So you can just see numbers over time because I I I'm greatly motivated by not necessarily like I am motivated by a streak. But I am motivated by seeing the things light up over time.

• 4:07Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah, you love that.

• 4:09Scott Tolinski?

  I do, and my, my exercise machine, I had a four-year streak going, a four-year weekly streak going until my concussion, and then I lost that four-year streak and it was devastating.

• 4:20Wes Bos?

  That's nuts.

• 4:22Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I do think that me personally, tracking these things can help. You pick something that you would, I, the, the ideal version of me would be good at this. The ideal version of me would be good at email. So therefore, I'm gonna make a, a task or a habit that is inbox zero, and I'm going to have a time in the day that gets me down to inbox zero every single day, and, or whatever, I, I'm gonna build this into my life. And you just gotta stick to it. I, I know it's January. And habits are so easy to say, I'm gonna do this in January, and then February, whatever, whatever, whatever. But, man, build a system for yourself and stick to that system. I, I, I think we are all so capable of it.

• 5:07Scott Tolinski?

  And, and I think so many people fall off on these things.

• 5:11Wes Bos?

  Small incremental improvements, man. That can, can, can really add up.

• 5:16Scott Tolinski?

  Every single day, yeah. You, you improve in, in different ways. Uh, there's all kinds of stuff that I like wanting to improve on, whether that is like stretching, or, or not drinking alcohol as much, or, I, I was having like shoulder pain, so I wanted to hang from a bar, so I put like hanging as a, as a daily task, and I hung and I fixed my shoulder. But if I didn't have that-

• 5:36Wes Bos?

  I had that as well. I, I had like a pinch in it and I couldn't like, I couldn't lift things up that were like away from my body. And like, I had it for like months, and I finally just hung like a couple days in a row, and I totally solved it.

• 5:48Scott Tolinski?

  I had a goal that was like, just do a handstand every day. And it wasn't like, spend thirty seconds doing handstands. It was just do a handstand every day.

• 5:56Wes Bos?

  Do a single handstand.

• 5:58Scott Tolinski?

  I got really stinking good at handstands, so-

• 6:00Wes Bos?

  Do it right now, Scott. Have you done yours today?

• 6:03Scott Tolinski?

  No.

• 6:03Wes Bos?

  Here we go.

• 6:05Scott Tolinski?

  I don't have a lot of room here, so-

• 6:08Wes Bos?

  I don't care.

• 6:16Wes Bos?

  Oh.

• 6:18Wes Bos?

  Oh gosh, he's gonna kick something.

• 6:20Scott Tolinski?

  Sorry, I have one hand on carpet and one hand on floor.

• 6:23Wes Bos?

  For audio listeners, you just nailed it. Oh, and he's doing a second. He's been a show off now.

• 6:30Wes Bos?

  Oh my gosh. All right, that's enough. He's been a show off now.

• 6:37Scott Tolinski?

  I have very little room to do, to do that.

• 6:39Wes Bos?

  That's, I know, I've been in your office. That's very impressive. I'd be impressed if you did that, if I could do that at all, let alone in your office.

• 6:47Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Yeah, it was one thing I wanted to get better at after doing my concussion was getting back into handstands because it's pretty low impact, right? So.

• 6:56Wes Bos?

  Yeah. Beautiful. All right. Next thing, what else? Another habit that I have here, I want to learn to wake up early. Probably my biggest flaw is that I hate waking up and it sucks. And I often think like, man, how sick would it be if I could wake up at like 5:30 and have a little bit more time? Because like, right now I do gym twice a week. That's just the amount of, I have two mornings a week where my wife takes the kids to school. My evenings right now, my evenings, I used, previously, I used to be able to just do so much in the evenings. I used to do something every night, you know, the house, house project or, or like coding something. And like, just the way family looks right now, I just don't have that time anymore, you know?

• 7:40Wes Bos?

  By the time you get everybody in bed, it's like 9:30 and I just don't have a time for it. So I would love to get at least one more gym day in a week. And where that time comes from is probably in the morning. So I need tips on like how to wake up early because, leave them down in the comments, because I would love to crack that nut.

• 7:59Scott Tolinski?

  So you think 5:30, that's the time you want to wake up?

• 8:02Wes Bos?

  I don't know if it's 5:30 or whatever, but it's just earlier. Like right now, I just wake up and I'm just like, I hate everything. It takes me like a good 20 minutes to just get going, you know? And I would love to just be a morning person where you could just wake up and like, yeah, I have my coffee and I calmly check my emails. And I went to the gym and now the kids are waking up and now we can tackle, you know? But it's just like, right now, it's just like chaos as soon as I wake up.

• 8:31Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. You know what? I, uh, here's a way that you can wake up early. Uh, you can get a concussion that gives you,

• 8:38Wes Bos?

  No, thanks.

• 8:39Scott Tolinski?

  Sleep issues. When I got my concussion, that was like, one of my biggest things was that I couldn't sleep. And then when I did go to sleep, I would wake up in the middle of the night and then I would wake up again at like four in the morning and not be able to go back to sleep. And I will say, there was a period there before I got on some medication to help me sleep, where I was getting up out of bed at like five o'clock and going downstairs to work because I was like, what was the point? I'm not gonna go to sleep anyways.

• 9:06Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 9:07Scott Tolinski?

  And I really liked it. I was like, I didn't really like not sleeping, but I really liked that time in the morning, uh, to get my stuff done. And now I wake up at seven-ish, uh, like seven, six thirty, uh, because the kids gotta get to school and stuff. Six, seven. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, they said it. We said it.

• 9:28Wes Bos?

  They did it. Yeah.

• 9:29Scott Tolinski?

  Did it. Yeah, our kids are big into six, seven right now.

• 9:32Wes Bos?

  Oh, man. Mine too. And I, I play into it too. It's great. Although apparently the new, there's a new brain rot called twenty-five, which is like Christmas brain rot. So now they're walking around being like, twenty-five. They're just ruining every number.

• 9:46Scott Tolinski?

  Ah, yes. Okay. Yeah. I know. It is very funny. It is, it is ridiculous. Even like the kids' school, they were at like a Halloween assembly and the dance teacher comes out and she's like, is everyone six, seven today? And they're like, the kids went nuts. It's just like,

• 10:03Wes Bos?

  So good.

• 10:03Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, my gosh. It's wild. Um, yeah. A habit that I would like to cultivate for this year would be to really embrace my to-dos at the start of every day. Any single time that I am feeling scatterbrained or unproductive, or like, I'm doing this or that, or I'm like, not feeling like I'm accomplishing a whole lot today. I, you know, I tell my wife, she's always like, Did you do your to do list for the day? And I have to shamefully go, no, I didn't. And I know if I did, I wouldn't have this problem. And then I do my to do lists and then I knock things off.

• 10:43Scott Tolinski?

  So like, I really need for my to do list, which I use the app tweak.s and still really, really love this app for how minimal it is. I need for this system for me every single morning to do my to do's. Like to list them out, to prioritize them, to schedule them, to keep it organized. Cause even it was, I, I, I did a good job of it, but then by November ish, especially with the concussion stuff, I know I'm going to be saving that a lot this episode. It really threw me off and things would just stick on my to do list for months and months and months. And this is like, all right, this is no longer a to do. This is like, you've tremendously passed this by.

• 11:27Scott Tolinski?

  So like, I need to really stay on top of my to do list.

• 11:32Wes Bos?

  What I do is I, I use things and I have like, I have an inbox where I just dump everything, which is like, that, that's probably what you're using for it. He's like, I have to do this at some point. And what I do is I'll just dump it into my inbox. And I also have it, it's hooked up to Apple reminders. So I can just do it from my phone as well. I often do it on my watch. I'll just be like, remind me to, to do X, Y, and Z. And I use that a ton because often I'm just like falling asleep or whatever, or like, like with the kids and I'll go, oh, I forgot to do X, Y, and Z, or I need to do this tomorrow. Or, or that would be a really good video idea.

• 12:08Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 12:08Wes Bos?

  And I'll just pop it in under my watch and then I'll, I'll go into inbox. And then you can drag things into the today, today, any day. I have a whole bunch of different categories that I'll drag things into. I use it also just as like a, just a way to have like video ideas, things like that.

• 12:22Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Yeah. Tweak has that where they have different lists. So I do have a videos list. I have a 3D print list. I have individual items for projects I'm working on. I have a sell on marketplace list that for a long time only grew. And guess what, Wes? With the advent of AI browsers, I finally started selling things on marketplace.

• 12:43Wes Bos?

  Oh, man. You know what? I, I got penalized on marketplace. I took pictures and gave them a chat GPT and said, write a description of what this product is.

• 12:52Scott Tolinski?

  That's, I've done that. Yeah.

• 12:54Wes Bos?

  But it like, it like, I got like shadow banned or something on marketplace. Like nobody replied.

• 13:00Wes Bos?

  To anything that I was, I was selling. I was like, oh shit, I got shadow banned. Yeah. And I tried, I, I've been posting stuff, just regular old. So I think they're, they're doing something with,

• 13:11Scott Tolinski?

  I sold my Rower, I sold my Wi-Fi 6 router. I sold all kinds of stuff this year and only because AI helped me do that.

• 13:20Wes Bos?

  Oh, that's great. But yeah, to do list is so key. And then I'll just drag things into today list and then I'll bubble them. I call it, I move them up and down and then just tackle every single one, especially when I'm feeling like, like you said, frazzled. I'll have a stack of mail. I hate mail so much. You get all these mails in the thing. You got property taxes that you have to pay and all these like,

• 13:41Scott Tolinski?

  God.

• 13:42Wes Bos?

  Like health cards that need to be renewed. I hate it so much. I'll just have a whole stack and then I'll just like blitz through it all at once.

• 13:50Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 13:50Wes Bos?

  It makes you feel a lot better.

• 13:51Scott Tolinski?

  Is a hole in the wall that like just drops it into a shredder somewhere or something because I end up, what I have is just a big pile of stuff to be shredded. That's all I do. And then you do it and it takes all day.

• 14:02Wes Bos?

  I have a, I have a shredder in my office and I just walk over and.

• 14:06Scott Tolinski?

  See, my, my, my office is outside. My shredder's in the basement.

• 14:11Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 14:12Scott Tolinski?

  I'm not just near it anymore.

• 14:13Wes Bos?

  No, you're not walking to it. I always process my mail in my office. So it works.

• 14:19Scott Tolinski?

  And if you want to see all of the errors in your application, you'll want to check out Sentry at sentry.io forward slash syntax. You don't want a production application out there that, well, you have no visibility into in case something is blowing up and you might not even know it. So head on over to sentry.io forward slash syntax. Again, we've been using this tool for a long time and it totally rules. All right.

• 14:43Wes Bos?

  Okay, let's talk about email. I'm the worst at email because I get so much garbage that I can't find the like actual good stuff out of it. And I've complained about this for a long time. I've tried setting up a whole bunch of AI rules and it all just doesn't work. I cannot figure out how to surface the email that matters to me. I get so much like slop incoming AI, like cold emails. And obviously I block it, but they just spin up a new domain name. But I need to figure out a system, A, to get less email. You know, I gotta figure out how to stop it from coming in the first place. And B, another system for just like dealing with it, you know, like I hate.

• 15:27Wes Bos?

  Email and I I rarely go through I go like I scan it once or twice a day and see hopefully I catch the important stuff. But sometimes stuff gets missed and I I don't love it.

• 15:37Scott Tolinski?

  I love inbox zero and I would love to help you get there. I reached. I've currently reached inbox zero for the last six weeks. I hit inbox zero 244 days of last year.

• 15:50Wes Bos?

  Oh, man.

• 15:52Scott Tolinski?

  Which means I have no emails in my inbox. Let me tell you, the key to inbox zero is to use your inbox as a to do list. If it is in your inbox, you have to do something with it. If it is meaningless, you you archive it, you get rid of it. If it's something you can do right now, you do it right now or you leave it for that part of the day where you can do it. If it's something you cannot do today, you snooze it. Bingo bango. You do that, you never have any emails. Like the most emails I ever have is when I wake up and there's like, you know, 12 emails in my inbox total. But like if you treat it like that, like truly like it's a to do list, man, like not only do you feel lighter about it every day.

• 16:36Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 16:37Scott Tolinski?

  But for me personally, it acts as like a to do list, another system like that, that I can like truly feel like I I know where everything's at. And I'm never, never guessing, right? The things that are a need to accomplish or not accomplish. So, yeah.

• 16:54Wes Bos?

  It's probably not on my part, probably not an email problem. It's more of a like, I don't feel like dealing with this right now. And then it just stacks up.

• 17:02Scott Tolinski?

  Snooze it.

• 17:03Wes Bos?

  And then it, yeah, but then I I do snooze it, but then it's true. Then I get so much like, how many emails have I got today alone? And I aggressively block and unsubscribe from everything and I have about 23 emails so far since midnight and it's.

• 17:19Wes Bos?

  Twelve, thirteen hours, which is not a, I guess it's not a lot, you know, I could probably blitzer those in five minutes, but.

• 17:26Scott Tolinski?

  I, I do it first thing every day and then I close my email and I don't open it for the rest of the day unless I'm like expecting a back and forth, but I do it very first thing and I do it like as part of my, my morning routine. I get into the office, I open up my inbox and I either snoo, I get, I snooze things sometimes for like a week. I'll say, I can't deal with this now until next Wednesday and you'll just snooze it for a week or whatever.

• 17:50Wes Bos?

  My problem is that I like, I sit down and I, I hopefully know what I'm going to work on and it's, I'm just getting into the code or I'm working on whatever project and like that's, my energy is the highest in the morning and that's when I want to get. I don't want to fritter away my time fussing with emails, you know, especially because I feel like most of the emails are people just demanding my time when I don't owe them anything.

• 18:13Scott Tolinski?

  You can just snooze them, get rid of them, trash it.

• 18:16Wes Bos?

  Yeah, yeah, that's true. Then they, then they send follow ups. I'm just checking in. Did you see X, Y and Z about our stupid AI tool? Would you like to do a YouTube video?

• 18:25Scott Tolinski?

  Block and report spam.

• 18:27Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I do, I do. I do every single one and they spin up brand new domain names every single time and I'm on some, I think it's because my email address is in the RSS feed.

• 18:37Scott Tolinski?

  Those are the fastest ones you can get through though, because you can just zoom right through them. You know it's, you don't have to read it. You just trash, trash, trash, trash, trash.

• 18:46Wes Bos?

  You know, exactly.

• 18:46Scott Tolinski?

  I like, I know superhuman was bought by Grammarly. I know it's an expensive tool. The thing I like about it though, is that the whole thing can be keyboard navigation and the, the key for getting rid of something is just E or something. So you can just look at your inbox, go, like you're in one and I can just hit E, the next one pop up, E, next one pop up and E. You know, I'm not like having to click through the things or find the buttons or whatever. And that to me, it makes it really smooth. My tasks in general, I think everything in my life, I would like to have more minimal. I've done a good job of this with inbox zero as evidenced just now, but I do find my to do system, as

• 19:28Scott Tolinski?

  I mentioned before, things pile up. My systems allow for things to pile up sometimes and I don't mean just to do's and the emails. I mean physical items. Sometimes I got papers over here that pile up. I got another stack of papers over here that pile up.

• 19:44Wes Bos?

  I hate papers so much.

• 19:46Scott Tolinski?

  My file system on my computer.

• 19:49Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 19:49Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. My file system on my computer and my NAS drive have just become a dumping ground of like, I'll organize this later. And I know, like, there's gotta be some tools. I actually built a, I, I built some personal software for myself, Wes, called Filebro.

• 20:09Scott Tolinski?

  And Filebro, I don't necessarily trust it just yet, but it will hopefully solve some of these issues where you can build, it's like Hazel, where you can build these kind of like, complex automations and then just have it buzz through and move your files around. I, I need to build in the ability to like, undo before I really let this thing rip on my file system. But I could find like, alright, scan, because it does transcripts too. So you could say, scan these, uh, video files. And anytime I mention the word level up tutorials, put it in the level up tutorials folder. Anytime I mention, uh, the name of the course, this is the name of the course, uh, put in this. And then I have these like complex JSON workflow documents.

• 20:49Wes Bos?

  See, I did that with my email. And it was just, it's all in the edge cases, you know? It works.

• 20:55Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:55Wes Bos?

  Like 93% of the time, but it works just not often enough that you're.

• 21:01Scott Tolinski?

  And I don't, I don't need this to work like automated for me every day. What I need this is to clean up the existing structure. Cause it is like, what I have is a giant pile of clothes. And what I need is those clothes to get folded and put in the right drawer. So that way, when I get a new piece of clothing, I don't just throw it in the pile and I have somewhere to put it. That is my problem.

• 21:27Wes Bos?

  Yeah. Systems, man.

• 21:28Scott Tolinski?

  Minimalist.

• 21:30Wes Bos?

  Minimalist, yeah.

• 21:31Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 21:31Wes Bos?

  That's a, that's a big problem of mine is that I'm a, I love things, like not, not, not like, like physical things, but like, I love.

• 21:39Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, I love physical things.

• 21:40Wes Bos?

  Getting into hobbies, you know? I love hardware and, and, and wires and I, like Christmas lights and all of this stuff. And I would love to be minimalist, but I'm, I am way too enthusiastic about learning new things. I will not be able to do that. Um, so I have many more systems as to like, where this stuff goes so that I can go grab it. Like I have all these boxes of different wires and things. And that's been, that's helped me so much.

• 22:06Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I, I, I don't need to be minimalist, but I would like to be minimalist with my systems or organized, I just say.

• 22:12Wes Bos?

  Yeah. Here's one that I am going to get so much better at this year is getting faster at typing and more accurate at typing, you know? I feel like, I, I just did a test and I'm at like 75 words a minute. I would love to be in like, like on a good day, 75, you know? And like, I wish I could be at maybe 90 words a minute and like very accurate as well.

• 22:38Scott Tolinski?

  Do you have a type checking tool, type typing tool?

• 22:41Wes Bos?

  Yeah, so I just asked on Twitter and a bunch of people sent me, there's one tool that will help you get better and it uses an algorithm based on like, it sees what you're, like what mistakes you are. For mine is I'm using the wrong finger to press I. You know, I'm, I'm using my pointer, Peter pointer to touch I and I should be using my middle finger.

• 23:03Scott Tolinski?

  Do you want to do a live type, speed typing on the show right now?

• 23:06Wes Bos?

  Let's do it. Cause I, one year from now, I am going to figure out if it's my keyboard and, or whatever, I'm gonna be.

• 23:16Scott Tolinski?

  I would like to do this too, cause I think I might be worse than you.

• 23:19Wes Bos?

  Really? No.

• 23:20Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. What, um, what is this tool?

• 23:23Wes Bos?

  I gotta sit down for this, hold on.

• 23:25Scott Tolinski?

  Ready?

• 23:26Wes Bos?

  This is it, um, yeah, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna kick my mic away, cause I, I feel like it gets in the way, even though I don't look at it. Okay, ready? Three, two, one, go.

• 23:51Wes Bos?

  Woo!

• 23:52Scott Tolinski?

  Woof.

• 23:53Wes Bos?

  All right, what'd you get?

• 23:54Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, my dear. Unmute, okay. Man. Yeah, so I I learned something about myself here is that when I was reading ahead of time, I was better than when I was just typing at like like following the word and just typing the next word I saw. If I like read and typed at a lag, I I did better. Um, how did you do?

• 24:19Wes Bos?

  I got 62 words a minute minute with 96 accuracy.

• 24:24Scott Tolinski?

  Okay, I did 58 words per minute with 96.

• 24:28Wes Bos?

  Oh, you're pretty close. We're pretty close then.

• 24:30Scott Tolinski?

  Pretty close. Yeah, I told you I'm not good. Not good.

• 24:34Wes Bos?

  That's the problem is that I have a lot of accuracy problems and it's obnoxious when you're coding because

• 24:40Scott Tolinski?

  Totally.

• 24:40Wes Bos?

  Then you gotta go back, especially with like curly brackets and things like that. So I want to get up to like 90 words a minute. And I think I can get there if you just if I just, I don't know, I asked on Twitter, people sent me this like, um, a couple of websites to practice, but also I'm wondering if a keyboard, because I think my problem is that I I'm touching the wrong keys.

• 25:02Scott Tolinski?

  Hmm.

• 25:03Wes Bos?

  And or I'm I'm using the wrong fingers. Yeah, that obviously that's the problem. You're touching the wrong keys, but I'm using the wrong fingers to go to the keys. So if I maybe, what if I move to a new keyboard to just hard break those problems? Will I be amazing? Can I get up to 90, 100 words a minute? Can I be amazing? And like I use odd speech to text quite a bit, but it's still something, something so key about being a fast typer.

• 25:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, I don't know, man. I, uh, that was a frustrating experience for me. But I would, I would absolutely, I think this is on my list as well. It would be fun to redo this at the end of this year and see. I do feel like my issue is just straight up typing the the next letter instead of like the current one. I wonder like how much uh, my dyslexia plays into here. I'm not making excuses, but I do wonder if if those reading challenges also matter. But I know I I could be way faster. I don't know. I felt like I was cruising too. And I wonder if like just fixing the accuracy issues increases the words per minute uh, by a ton.

• 26:10Wes Bos?

  Ah, that was, that was good. So let us know down below. What is your words per minute? And? How do we get better at this? Cause I, I want to be a machine. You know, Ben, Ben and Vinegar types 150, 140 words a minute. And I don't know, like that's, that's so key in coding. The funny part about that is he would often think about what he was like typing in Slack, like quite a bit. So you would, you would see Ben is typing for so long. Cause he's, he's going back and like, ah, maybe we should phrase that different. But first coding, so good.

• 26:43Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, totally.

• 26:45Wes Bos?

  Man, yeah, I need to, it's the year of, the year of learning to type fast.

• 26:50Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, it's the year of learning to type fast. I love it. Cool. I agree with you on that one. I gotta have that. Another thing I would like to do is continue listening to more like self-help book and personal advancement books, those types of things. I do and have always loved a good self-help book. My Audible is just a graveyard of self-help books and I'll, I'll listen to any of them. I'll listen all the way through. It does not matter if I end up implementing any of the things. It gets me a bit of juice to implement change in my life. But I did find over the past year and things were stressful with me with my, my head injury and just like the amount,

• 27:34Scott Tolinski?

  I didn't feel like I had any room for personal growth, even though I was like, I was doing a lot of healing. So I would love to get back into listening to a bunch of books. And I already have a whole bunch downloaded and ready to go that I, I downloaded legally off of whoever knows where you got, buy legal audiobooks.com. But I, I would love to just re-implement that in life and listen to more, more books. Cause I can fill my time with a lot of boring ass podcasts or, you know.

• 28:05Wes Bos?

  See, I much prefer the like interesting podcasts. I used to be huge into audiobooks and I still am like, I like the like atomic habits or whatever, but I find a lot of these self-help books so cheesy. You know, I listened, I listened to this like David Goggins, you know, everyone's crazy about how amazing this guy is. And, and like, I'm just like listening to this and being like, yeah, this guy can like, like obviously run marathons and break his legs and keep running, but like. The rest of your life is in shambles, brother. You know, you have no good relationships. You're just hurting everybody in your life. Like, all of this is at the cost of what?

• 28:43Scott Tolinski?

  What?

• 28:43Wes Bos?

  And like, I'm not motivated by this, you know? Like, it's, I find myself, as the older I get, the less, the more I find this stuff to be super cheesy. I don't know why that is. I don't think that I'm like, becoming negative, but I just, like, I see through a lot of this stuff, like, yeah, but like, the rest of your life is, you kind of sacrifice everything else in your life to get really good at running through the desert.

• 29:07Scott Tolinski?

  I agree with that, but I still like some of those things. I think for me, like, the thing that turns me off of one is like, when something is super derivative of something else I've already listened to before, or you can tell it's just like, a reworking of these other ideas that somebody else had. One of the things that I've been liking lately in books, especially about like, technology, is like, maybe like, more history in stories about like, real things and real history. They call that history. And, and I do think that like, those things are inspiring to me in the same way that self-help books are. So maybe that's it, too. Maybe I just like, have reached the limit on, I've listened to all of the good self-help books

• 29:51Scott Tolinski?

  and need to listen to more history or more things that I actually want to spend time on. Because I do love history, personally. History and science, yeah.

• 30:00Wes Bos?

  Maybe that's where I'm at as well. It's like, I've listened to them all. I understand all of the, to do whatever. I have a pretty good to-do system and I understand the habits and everything. And yeah, it's similar to like, coding as well. You know, like, I, there's only so many tutorials you can do before you just gotta go and do it.

• 30:18Scott Tolinski?

  You know what I would like to do also, Wes? I would like to, and I actually built an app for this. Not vibe-coded, by the way. I built this by hand, not that it matters. But- Long-term habits where you have your daily habits and your like daily resolutions, things you want to do every single day, but there's like some things I would like to do once a month. So I built like an app where you can say, remind me to do this thing every four months, or remind me to do this thing every three months. And then like, it just has like a feed and it pops up and it says like, all right, you have two months until you have to do this again. And you could just kind of always see that what's at the top to these things that like, that way you can make sure that you're like staying on

• 31:02Scott Tolinski?

  top of either relationships you want to cultivate, like professional relationships, like, oh, my, you know, there's a buddy of mine, I haven't talked to him in, in months. Like, one of those things could just be like, send so-and-so a message because, you know, life gets busy. And just stuff like that, you know, I would love to develop and improve that system. Or what I should do is I should take that long-term kind of habits, like things that only happen several times a year, and just put that in my habit tracker app. Just put it in that. So that way I don't have two surfaces. I'm already looking at the habit tracker app every day. Oh, here's one. I would like to ship more things. I have a real big problem of starting a lot of things and not finishing them.

• 31:45Wes Bos?

  I think we all do. Yeah.

• 31:47Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. I would love to ship some things. I have a video recording app that hopefully by the time you're listening to this has been shipped. I actually have it signed by my Apple developers account, and I would like to get in the hands of people like Wes to test it. So that way I can actually ship it because I'm using it right now. And you know what? It does me no good to just write this thing and have myself use it. I could put it up online and have other people use it as well. So I gotta ship. I gotta ship this year.

• 32:15Wes Bos?

  Me too. I, I, you make so many fun things and then you get. Unexcited about it and then you just

• 32:21Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 32:22Wes Bos?

  Like I actually finish it and I use it, but like that extra 10% of like actually pushing it out there so other people can use it and enjoy it is

• 32:30Scott Tolinski?

  That's the hardest part.

• 32:31Wes Bos?

  Is kinda key. Yeah. And, and then on top of it, actually making a video about it. Like I made this cool sticker printer thing that like prints stickers based on AI. And that worked, that did super well on Twitter and, and short form content. But I was like, I should really make a, I posted the code, a bunch of people are using it, but I didn't make a video on it. I should do a video on it.

• 32:52Scott Tolinski?

  Make a video about that Wes. I'm demanding it. Cause I like that. I want to see what you did there and I want to do it myself. Alright, so that's all I got. What kind of habits would you like to cultivate in your life this year? What types of things would you like to change and how are you doing that? What's your systems like? To-dos? What's your systems like for habits? All this stuff. Books that you like, that you think we might like. Love all of that stuff and more. So hit us up with that information in the comments, Twitter, Facebook, whatever. Hit us up. We'd love to hear from you. As always, we'll catch you in the next one.

• 33:24Wes Bos?

  Peace.

• 33:25Scott Tolinski?

  Peace.