I already summed up my 2025, but it took me more than two months to properly shape my plans for 2026. 😁

The first year of fatherhood felt like a sprint with no breaks and no pauses - just do, do, do. Now the kids are finally sleeping more or less through the night, the minivan saves my wife and me from driving across the city to daycare every single day, and that means it’s finally possible to build some sort of routine.

The goals themselves are probably pretty ordinary, but the older I get, the more it feels like the simpler the goal sounds, the harder it is to actually pull off.
So, go go go!

• Get back to lifting Back pain has worn me out enough, and the only real answer is to start training with weights again. No matter what the kinesiotherapist says, what YouTube recommends, or what another article promises, in the end it all comes down to building this beat-up body back up and giving my spine a break.

• Finally swim 2 km freestyle My current record is still 1 km, and even that comes with the last 300 meters feeling painfully hard. It’s good for my back, sure, but internally I’m fighting for my life. So this is the year to focus on technique and finally get that milestone done once and for all.

• Improve the way I work My current project involves a lot of regular, unquestioned AI usage, which can feel a little bleak at times. If I want to move through tasks faster and spend more time on things that are actually interesting, I need to go deeper into this new AI-shaped world of tech.

• Travel more I bought the minivan not only to make city logistics easier, but also to make traveling with kids actually comfortable. For now, the plan is to explore more of Romania, but ideally I’d love to make it to the mountains and squeeze in a snowboard trip too.

• Start playing padel tournaments I’ve been training at least twice a week for over a year now, and I want to finally step into the competitive side of it and start gaining tournament experience. The federation in Moldova isn’t functioning especially well, so I’ll probably have to look for opportunities elsewhere - but who knows, maybe I’ll end up playing more locally too.

I hope that by the end of the year I’ll manage to make real progress in at least one of the points above — but that’s a story for the end of the year