Groundhog Day Resolutions 2026 Kickoff Part II: Questions to Answer

Monday, February 9, 2026.

Continuing from The 2026 Groundhog Day February Kickoff

Welcome back to the continuation of my strategic planning for 2026! The plan is to wrap it up by February 14 as a valentine to future self 💞

To recap what I said in part 1: there were Four Acts, the last of which was The Month of Building. The positive outcome gives me confidence that I still know how to design and share my own ideas online despite the career detour I’d taken through Javascript development.

But what about the other three acts? These were:

1. Testing “Values-First Productivity”
2. Defining “Sentiment-First Communication”
3. Reconciling Cognitive Differences

I had started with the question whether a values-first approach to productivity was a better fit for me than what is commonly assumed with goal setting, with the “values” being authenticity, transparency, and curiosity as the drivers of both my work and daily interaction with others.

My feeling is yes, it’s feels much better but that doesn’t make the need to make a living go away. While I didn’t realize it at the time, finding a happy balance between my values and other people’s values occupied much of my time through July.

There were several stressing events that gave rise to Act 2:

• Managing pre-trip anxiety from a month-long family trip to Taiwan as a transgender person who can’t speak or read the native language
• An unexpected and surprising breakdown of communication with a respected aquaintance

The way I coped was to create a new set of guidelines that recognized that a lot of human communication is about expressing sentiment, not dataThe working hypothesis can be found at Sri’s Theory of Sentiment-first Communication. And this hypothesis lead directly to a re-evaluation of my cognitive differences as a neurodivergent person that communicates by sharing data first so other people can make their own conclusionsTo illustrate the difference, consider the casual greeting, “how are you?” when you meet an acquaintance. I, like many other neurodivergent people, will actually try to tell you what is going on in my life (data-first). The desired response is really just to acknowledge your social familiarity in a friendly way (sentiment-first). It took me decades to learn to hold in my data-first response and just say, “I’m fine!”. emotional good will is already present.

Despite coming up with these mechanisms, I felt a lingering unease that eventually became severe depressive spiral. I questioned everything I thought I knew about myself. I didn’t blame myself directly, but hammered away on my memories looking for the “reasons” why I was this way and felt frustrated that I had “still failed to realize” after so many years on this planet! I eventually crystalized these feelings into two themes:

• suppressed anger over social barriers caused by cognitive differences with others, and having to twist myself into knots to accomodate those differences.
• persistent anxiety about these barriers are a major cause of feeling rejection, which has lead to me chasing independence and demonstrable competence to be seen as having high market value.

I would very much like to not feel like that anymore. These are very long-lived demons that have plagued me since early childhood, and this negativity severely undermines my personal desire to genuinely authentic, transparent, and curious as I interact with other people.

New Questions for 2026

For this year, I think the term Emotional Regulation covers the issues I touched on above. Here’s a list of things I know about myself that are related to emotional regulation:

• I know I spend a lot of time managing irritation and frustration with low quality work, or being subjected to it.
• I know that my bursts of productivity are highly dependent on feeling connected with other people who I feel are excited to work toward something cool, and this has been lacking.
• I have historically been anxious about being rejected or misunderstood as this is a common occurrence.
• I know now that there are significant cognitive differences that explain why it is difficult for me to relate with other people that process emotion and information differently.

Phrasing this more simply: I spend a lot of energy managing my emotional state so I can work. This is necessary overhead. What is UNNECESSARY is being angry and anxious all the time! So here is my first attempt at setting a GHDR Directive for the year, framed as a question:

The hope is that if I let go of these negative emotions, I can be free to pursue things that I have been scared to do. But that raises a disturbing question about whether I’m motivated at all:

The emphasis is on doing, but historically the only thing that seems to make me do things is if other people are involved and committed to daily conversation as we collectively solve and design stuff. This kind of communication makes me happy, but maybe it means that I actually don’t like doing things for their own sake.

Another directive from last year was building community. It’s fun to plan and outline organizations like The Colony because it’s easy to describe its benefits, but I will set aside for now because it’s way too much for me to handle. So here’s a rephrasing:

The distinction between community and circle is one of scale and also personal alignment. A small community carries the responsibility of governance. A circle is far more personal.

Continuing Initiatives

These issues aside, I think it’s a given that I’ll be continuing to work on my design business by adapting the process from The Month of Building for 2026.

The intent behind this is to find like-minded people for fruitful interaction resulting in collaboration or income. This goes hand-in-hand with the takeaway from 2025:

I think I’ve outlined my main concerns for 2026. By answering questions, I hope to improve my sense of well-being that will support the continuing initiatives.

In the next part of this kickoff, I’ll try to formalize what I’ve noted into something resembling a plan.

INDEX of GHDR 2026 POSTS