4 Tiny Habits I Do Before Year-End (So 2026 Is More Profitable and Peaceful)

Sam Vander Wielen: All right. Who’s ready to wind down for the year? I certainly am. I’m about to put my PJs on and close down my computer, put my mic away. But before I do, I wanted to pop in and chat with you before the end of the year because it’d be nice to come back in January to like a tidier life, a tidier business, right?

Both literally and figuratively. In order to come back in January with that refreshed feeling that I think we all kind of enjoy, like, you know, that fresh new journal feeling, new month feeling, turning the page, feeling there are things we have to do right now, or at least over the next couple of weeks, even if we’re cozied up. They’re not hard. Don’t worry. That we can’t wait to do until January if we wanna feel good in January. So in this quickie episode, before I go out on a short holiday break, don’t worry, the show will be back on January 5th, but we are gonna take the holidays off.

I’ll share a few things I do in my life, in my business before I close my laptop for the final time in 2025, so that I come back refreshed and ready for 2026.

In case you’re new here, welcome to On Your Terms®. I’m so happy to have you On Your Terms®, is a podcast for online business owners who want to be as present in their lives as profitable in their businesses, because around here, I believe we can absolutely do both.

Now, one of the ways that we do that is by being really intentional in our businesses in terms of, you know, reflecting on where we’ve been and planning for where we wanna go and in case you missed it. The last two episodes, episode 267 and 268 were my annual planning episodes, so these are big every single year we do a reflection episode, that was 267 and then we do a planning episode for 2026. That was episode 268. In these episodes, I walk you through kind of my go-to two-step process of reflecting and planning in order to have a more successful year and one of the things you gotta know if you’re gonna come here and listen to On Your Terms®, you have to know that when I say success, I talk about this a lot in my book. When I start my business, I’ll be happy, but when I say success, I don’t always mean, making more money, having kabillion figures per minute.

You know, I’m not here to buy a G-Wagon, like I don’t care about that stuff. I, if that’s what you wanna do, then that’s great, do it. But be intentional about it and know why you wanna do that and what you think that that’s gonna change for you. But if you also are like, Hey, I wanna live my life, I don’t wanna be on my phone all the time.

I wanna travel, I wanna connect with people, I wanna do a good job and actually provide a good service and a good product, and I just wanna be content and happy and present in my life and feel fulfilled like I know all that other stuff doesn’t fulfill me. Then not only is this the right place for you, but that’s essentially how you know this planning process is like how you get in touch with what that version of success means to you.

And you don’t need to accept everybody else’s. You need to get clear on what it means to you. So if you haven’t yet, I would go back and I would listen to that.

Now if you listen to the last episode, then you know I’m testing out a new little segment here where we pull a card from this deck I have called Tell Me More. It’s completely random. I haven’t seen the card ahead of time. I’m going to answer it off the top of my head and I want you to do the same. I want you to write it down, journal about it, reach out to me and tell me about something that came up to you. Um, but since this is new and we’re going on break next week, I need you to DM me on Instagram at samvanderwielen or reply to any of my emails and tell me whether you want me to keep doing this segment. If you like it or not. It’s okay. It won’t hurt my feelings. We can skip it, we can ditch it. Or I’m gonna keep going.

So let’s pull a card. I’ve already shuffled the deck, so I’m just gonna randomly pull a card. Oh, okay. What are you pretty sure you could never get tired of? Okay. The first thing that came up for me is popcorn.

I love popcorn so much. I, I could have a whole podcast dedicated to popcorn, but I won’t make you listen to that. Um, but I just will tell you, if you don’t have a whirly pop already, you can thank me later. Your life will be changed forever. All right. Tell me, what do you think is something that you could never get tired of? I can’t wait to hear it.

Okay. So in today’s episode, I’m just gonna share a couple of quick things that I’m going to do over the next couple of weeks as I am out of office, but still at home, just winding down, taking some chill, cozy time. I hope that you get the opportunity to do the same, or maybe you’re traveling and doing something fun.

So these are, this is exactly what I do. Okay? The first thing is that I buy anything that I need. Key. Key, key word on need. Need is the key word. I don’t buy a bunch of random crap that I don’t need, but i’m talking about for my business, if there’s anything I’ve been thinking about this year that would help me to, you know, make my life better to improve some sort of process that would upgrade a tool, I invest in it now.

And that’s for a very specific reason. That is because you, you need to get your business expenses in by December 31st, so you need to buy anything that you need. And have that payment on your credit card or your bank statement by December 31st. In order for this to count towards this year’s business expenses. When you up your business expenses, we reduce the taxable revenue that you have in your business. So that’s why.

Now it’s not a dollar for dollar exchange. So if you buy something that’s $200, for example, it doesn’t reduce the amount of taxes you owe by $200. It reduces the overall taxable income you have by $200. And because our, we are taxed in America on a percentage basis, uh, you know, an escalating, uh, scale of of percentage. It just reduces that total amount that you’re essentially, that the percentage is being taxed on. So it’ll reduce it a little bit, but not dollar for dollar. I think that’s important for you to know.

But yeah, if there’s anything that you need in terms of tools, like last year I bought my DJI Osmo Pocket three, the little camera video thing, which I honestly don’t use as much as I I should.

I just, I don’t know, this has not been my year for being like, excited about making lots of content, so I’m, I’m a bad example in that case, but that thing is incredible and I would like to use it more.

I know that a lot of my customers also purchase legal templates from me, or they get the Ultimate Bundle® from me because they want to start their businesses in 2026.

So now is a great time. I’ll make sure that we include a link down in the show notes for the Ultimate Bundle® that gives you $400 off, so make sure you click that below.

The second thing that I do is clean. I love to clean. That’s probably another thing I could never get tired of. I just love to clean. I’m one of those dorks, and it’s fine.

I embrace it, it’s fine. But I like to clean my office because I’m kind of closing it up for the year, and I like to do some of the deeper things that I just don’t take time to do throughout the year. So for one, I clean my desk, obviously, and my mom taught me when I was little, the best way to clean things is to remove everything clean and then put things back.

So I remove everything from the surface, from the desk drawer. I clean, obviously reorganized, get everything all situated, and then of course, clean that drawer out as well. Get whatever things you need help with to organize it all. Personally, I’ve been loving having glasses or like really cool mugs on my desk where I’m keeping all my pens and stuff. That is really random, but that has really like added some jazz and some spice I think to my desk lately.

I clean my office closet again by taking everything out, putting it back in. Um, and then I do a deep clean of my actual office space itself.

The third thing I do is clean my digital workspace. So I clean my computer, my files, my desktop. I physically clean my actual computer and my iPad and all of that kinda stuff. But I also try to dig into things like Google Drive or Asana, anywhere where I’m keeping lots of documents, photos, videos, and I try to clean it all up.

And the fourth thing I do is get off of social media. The thing that I like, the first time I ever took a break from social media was when I started doing this for Christmas break.

I’ve always closed down for the last two weeks of the year, and I, I’m Jewish by the way, and I don’t, I don’t know. I celebrate everything. I’m, I’m open to everything and so I just closed the last two weeks of the year. I think it’s fun. Nobody else is around. It’s fine by me, but I get off of social media during that time and it just feels like such a great break like it’s just so by this time of the year, you’ve got so much stuff that’s happened and I just think it’s a nice clean break to like unclog your brain. You’ll have to let me know if you’re gonna commit to also being off social media, like, you know, DM me on social media real quick and then log off, like delete it. I really recommend just deleting the app off your phone. It’s the best way.

Yeah, so that’s what I do to kind of close up shop from the end of the year. I, I don’t know if that was helpful at all to hear it. You’ll have to let me know, but I’m just really looking forward to taking the next couple of weeks low and slow.

I don’t have any plans. I don’t have any plans to travel. That’s totally fine with me. I’ve traveled so much this year and I’m traveling pretty early, um, in the new year. So I really just want to spend the holidays,, mostly in my pajamas, probably my Lake pajamas ’cause they’re. The most comfortable thing I own.

I do a lot of cooking and I try to tackle my more like cooking projects, my cooking oriented projects, uh, like when I take a lot of time off. Like I love making pasta from scratch, although I’m not eating gluten, so that’s gonna add a fun new wrench. But yeah, I, I like doing that. I make lots of like soups. I’ll save all my scraps and like finally cook my broth. Like I make tons and tons of veggie broth. My nutritionist, Erin Parekh she just told me about this, uh, great book, this cookbook called The Art of Gluten-Free Bread. And so I just got that and I’m excited to kind of play with a few of of those things. So yeah, hopefully there’s a lot of cooking in my future. I take a lot of walks this time of year.

I was thinking about doing an episode next month. You’ll have to tell me if you want to hear this kind of episode, but like I was thinking about doing an episode next month about all the things that I’ve learned to do to help boost my, like winter happiness.

Because moving from Philadelphia to, uh, like the eastern part of Long Island is that it is so much colder here. It’s so much darker. It gets darker earlier. It’s like wet and windy and it’s, I think it’s rough. It’s like a straight up New England winter in my opinion, being like an outsider who lives here now.

And I just feel like I really had to step up my game when I moved here to figure out like I can’t just be inside all the time and be depressed, but that it’s dark at 3:30. So I’ve come up with a lot of like tips and tricks I think to, to help, So with that, I just take a lot more walks during the day and getting outside when it is light outside.

I do take advantage of being near the Hamptons. We go to the Hamptons a lot. It’s so nice ’cause it’s so quiet and all the like, all the people who come like in and visit for the day aren’t there. It’s really quiet. You always run into celebrities in the Hamptons this time of year because they’re all retreating there too.

I run into celebrities every single time I’m there. I’m like some weird magnet. Last time we had lunch, like right next to Alec Baldwin, we’ve run into Paul McCartney. Like it’s just craziness there. But I love it there. This time of year, it’s so peaceful.

More than anything, I just wanna give myself a moment to, you know, reflect on this year, but also think even more deeply about what I want next year to feel like. I wrote a Substack article recently about how, I’m thinking about 2026 as a gap year, and it’s been really interesting to see like how different people have interpreted that. So some people thought that I meant that I was like. Like I’m gone, like I’m taking a sabbatical. I was like, no, no, no, I’m not doing that.

And other people just meant like, I don’t know. They just didn’t get it. Which I guess I just was not very good at explaining it. But I think when I say gap year, what, the way that I’m thinking about 2026, and I talked about this a little bit in the planning episode but the way that I’m thinking about 2026 is like, it’s like a mentally a gap year.

Like giving myself a break from thinking so hard about what’s next, thinking like, or having to come up with the exact plan and strategy of what I wanna do. I haven’t gotten the clarity that I’ve wanted and and thought would kind of come to me after this year, and I think part of that was because this year was so busy that I couldn’t really think of anything.

So the way that I’m approaching 2026 is just to ease up. Like I’m not adding anything new. I’m not launching any books. I’m not creating something new as far as I know right now. Like, and I’m also giving myself permission to say like, Hey, if I come up with a great product idea and I wanna create it, great run with it.

But I’m really trying to be more discerning of like, Hey, do I really wanna do that? Not saying yes to everything whereas this year was totally a year of, like I said, yes to everything, went to everything. I just don’t think I’m gonna do that in 2026.

And I think more than anything, I’ve just been really yearning to get in touch with my creativity and I am, I’m pretty frustrated because I talk a lot about how creative I wanna be, or I talk a lot about like the creative things I want to do, but then I won’t actually do them. Like I talk about it, I read about it, I research it, I like start to plan it, but I don’t just do. And so much of that is because I’m afraid to just like, let go and just try, right?

And I’m, I’m pretty good at that when it comes to like certain business things, like marketing strategies or something like that, I’m not so good at it when it just comes to me as a person. So that’s really my goal for the, these next couple of weeks is just thinking a little bit more about like, what does that really look like? What does that mean that I need. What does that mean? That I don’t need anymore? Like what do I need to let go of? What do I need to add?

But for me, it’s probably more than anything, it’s just like I need a little trial by fire time with creativity. I want to write more, you know, I ultimately, I want to write another book. And I wanna write another book that’s even more widely like, available to people in terms of like, who it, who it applies to and so, uh, and I don’t think I wanna write about straight up like business or, you know, definitely not legal or anything like that, my first, my first book isn’t even about legal. But I wanna write another book. I really want this podcast to grow and for this community to grow and to be more tight knit and to pull in more and more people who listen to this podcast, which by the way, you can help me with if you, you know, let somebody know about this podcast who you think would like it. But that’s, that’s for another discussion.

But yeah, so I, that’s, that’s sort of what I wanna do over these next few weeks, is just think, think about. Really, what does that look like for me? And maybe just start putting some plans into motion, like signing up for classes, like art classes. I’ve been drawing, I’ve been learning how to draw. I wanna go take a pottery class. So just doing things like that and just kinda like finally signing up for it instead of just sitting here talking about it all the time, which is how I feel like I’ve been for the last couple of months. So that’s that.

So no matter what, you celebrate, what you recognize. I hope that you have a fantastic holiday season, Merry Christmas to you. Happy Hanukkah. Happy Kwanza. Like I mentioned, I will be back on January fifth with a brand new episode of On Your Terms®. If you haven’t already, make sure you hit subscribe or follow the show wherever you listen. Leave a quick review, send a text to a friend with a link to an episode that you loved.

It all really, really helps me to grow this podcast, which as you know is my main goal. So I really appreciate it. And again, happy holidays. I’ll chat with you soon. Go get cozy.

Thanks so much for listening to the On Your Terms® podcast. Make sure to follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. You can also check out all of our podcast episodes, show notes, links, and more at samvanderwielen.com/podcast. You can learn more about legally protecting your business and take my free legal workshop, Five Steps To Legally Protect and Grow Your Online Business at Samvanderwielen.com and to stay connected and follow along, follow me on Instagram at samvanderwielen and send me a DM to say hi.