Year's Start: Looking Forward to 2026

Every year I try to find a theme. Something short enough to remember, specific enough to guide decisions, vague enough to apply broadly. Earlier this year I wrote about “do a small thing well” as a mantra for avoiding burnout. * The process itself became part of the point. Using AI as a tool for abstract planning felt appropriately meta for someone who spends most of their time thinking about AI. This year I tried something different: I used AI to help me develop the theme through a more structured process.

The Process

I started with Claude. I gave it a detailed prompt to interview me about 2025: what worked, what didn’t, what felt like momentum versus drift. The model followed the script I gave it, asked the follow-up questions I’d outlined, and helped me articulate patterns I hadn’t put into words.

Then we shifted to 2026. What do I actually want? Not the performative goals that sound good in a year-end post, but the real ones. The ones that would make me feel genuinely satisfied in December.

Once I had the theme roughed out, I switched to ChatGPT so I could generate images. I explicitly asked it to help me develop a brand vision for the theme. Treating a personal philosophy like a design brief forced clarity. What’s the core message? What’s the tone? What would this look like if it were real?

◊ The AI-generated brand mockups. Absurd? Maybe. But clarifying.

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What I’m Letting Go Of

Pointless screentime. The phone as default filler feels like nothing but adds up to a lot of something. I don’t mean cutting screen time entirely, just the reflexive scroll when I’m bored or uncomfortable or waiting. That time compounds.

What I’m Making Room For

Reading fiction. A conscious counterbalance to all the technical reading. I used to read novels constantly. Somewhere in adulthood that fell away.

Practicing math. I work with math day to day in many respects but don’t feel like I could do many of the problems from school today if I needed to. I want to get better about maintaining that knowledge and learning more just for the sake of it.

Outdoor activities with Izzy. The obvious one, but probably the most important. She’s at an age where everything is an adventure, and I want to be present for as many of those as possible.

What I’m Starting

Getting Izzy good enough on her strider bike that she can join me on runs. Reading more consistently about things not obviously related to my job. Refreshing on some forgotten math. Continuing to write.

The Theme

Scratch every itch.

Don’t let the curiosity or the impulse just sit there. Really lean in to curiosities, ideas, and hunches. The cost and difficulty of trying things (at least the kinds of things I tend to have ideas about) is going down, so why not? The opposite of complacency.

◊ The lighter colorway. I'm partial to the brown, personally.

The Brand Vision

This is where the exercise got interesting. I asked ChatGPT to help me articulate what “Scratch Every Itch” actually means:

Scratch Every Itch is a personal practice.

It is a commitment to curiosity taken seriously. Questions followed to their end, ideas given time, and attention treated as something worth defending. Nothing here is optimized for scale, speed, or noise. Each object, word, and gesture exists to support thinking, making, and finishing.

Curiosity is not a distraction.

◊ Poster concept with tagline.

I then had it generate brand artifacts: merchandise mockups, poster concepts, the whole treatment. Completely unnecessary, obviously. But something about seeing the theme visualized made it stick. It stopped being an abstract resolution and started feeling like something I could actually commit to.

The Meta Point

Using AI this way for personal planning isn’t something I would have done even a year ago. But this is what I mean by scratching the itch. The idea popped into my head (what if I structured a year-end reflection as an interview?), and instead of letting it evaporate, I tried it.

I did this in the passenger seat of the car on a drive home from St. Simons, again a much more complex task that I would have ever done in such a position in years prior.

I’m not sure that the design output was incredible, or production grade by any means, but the proess of thinking through it was interesting and a different way to engage with the time-honored new years goal setting routine.

The result was useful. Not because the models had profound insights I couldn’t have reached alone, but because the structure I imposed through them forced me to articulate things I’d been vaguely thinking. And the brand exercise, silly as it seemed, forced precision. * Well, my wife was driving, but you know what I mean. The models were tools; I was driving.

2026 is for scratching itches.

Here’s to curiosity.

- Will

Previous Year’s End Posts:

• Year’s End: Looking Back at 2025
• Year’s End: Looking back on 2017
• Reflecting on 2018: A Year of Growth and Transitions