Time is the only thing we all have in common. I didn’t make this up. Of course I didn’t! Anything to do with the time dimension always has me running up last, late, to the end of the line. It’s given me a lot of pause lately. Think it out.
We all have different personalities, different families, different incomes and tastes and habits. Even people who work at the same job, keep the same shift, live in the same building, or come from the same family tree are not alike in every way. We do, though, have the same 24 hours a day in common. That’ll be a bit different after we establish a colony on Mars, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Here we are at the change of another calendar year. It’s arbitrary. Why so many of us are following the Julian calendar instead of some other system is an accident of fate. That doesn’t matter, though, because it’s a scaffold around all our days. We might as well accept that time is a standard that applies to everyone equally, since nothing else does. Time passes by the hour and minute, and I don’t feel it. It’s like being color-blind. Direction is another sense I seem to lack, and I struggle with maps in the same way that I struggle with clocks. That’s part of why I take my yearly and seasonal planning so seriously. I like having some kind of metric to measure my progress. What am I doing with my time on Earth? A year is also a useful benchmark for comparing one physical state to another. Haircuts are the easiest to spot in a timeline of photos. Fashion trends, puppies, kittens, small children. I’m more interested in my personal condition: my health, home, finances, and relationships. Am I still in touch with the people who matter to me? When’s the last time I talked to them or saw them in person? How do I feel when I’m at home? Can I relax there? Can I have people over? Does my home feel warm, comfortable, and welcoming? Am I proud? Does it look intentional? How are my finances? Am I busy spending money I don’t have living a lifestyle I can’t afford? Am I being fair to Future Me? Are Big Banks sucking my marrow? How is my health? Am I sleeping well? Am I drinking enough water? Can I get down on the ground and get back up again without holding on to anything? Can I run up a flight of stairs? Is my energy level more like “kick down a fence” or “fell down a hole”? Compared to last year, compared to two years ago, compared to three years ago, how am I doing? It would be nice if we could see some pictures of the future from time to time. How am I doing today compared to Future Me? If I knew more, would I change my behaviors? Would I save more money? Would I strut my stuff, realizing I’ll never look quite so fly ever again? We can’t know the future. We can, though. We can know the future by creating it. Things we do today can affect our setup for tomorrow. We can send ourselves stuff in the future, like journals and money and muscle and real estate and specific effort. If I want Future Me to get a PhD, I have to apply to school and do all the homework in the now-today. If I want Future Me to be married, then Today Me can’t go around verbally abusing Today-Husband. If I want a lunch to eat on Tuesday, then I have to go grocery shopping today. It seems so dumb and insignificant on the day or week scale, but on the year or decade scale it makes all the difference. Can I play a musical instrument, can I touch my toes, can I speak another language, am I up for promotion? Am I giving as much love and kindness as I wish to receive? Other people do such impressive things with their 24 hours. Other people out there are playing the cello or going to the culinary institute. I’m sitting here trying to figure out why I have bookmarks in thirteen different books. Most of what we do doesn’t matter. Most of what I do doesn’t, anyway! A hundred years from now nobody is going to care if I left dishes in the sink or made a scene at a party or won the lottery. A hundred years from now, even my own descendants won’t know my name or give a lick about me. They probably won’t have seen my photo or heard a recording of my voice. In some ways, that’s liberating, ever so freeing. It gives a certain license to behavior of all sorts. We’re judged only in the moment and only by how we made other people feel. The metric is whether we take responsibility for the effects of our words and facial expressions. In other ways, it’s a tall order, trying to think of something that matters enough to be significant on a longer time scale. Am I capable of more? Am I capable of leaving a legacy of some kind? Have I been working on it? How can I tell if I’m making progress? In time, in time, certain names stand out for their work and the impact they made. They participated in the great conversation and played a bigger role on the world stage, for good or ill. Could we be among them, you and I? Are we making as much use of the same 365-day year as they did? Time is the only thing we all have in common, the queens and the killers, the poets and the pop singers. Let’s just pause at least once a year to check in and see if we’re using our time as well as we’d like. Every November, I convince myself I’m going to do NaNoWriMo. I’ve tried for at least seven years running. Every year, not only do I fail to meet the quota, but I fail to write ANYTHING AT ALL. November is my worst month, between family travel and the weather and cold season and irresistible food photos tempting me to try new recipes. I publish over 1000 pages a year, and I routinely write at least double the NaNoWriMo word count. It’s not like I can’t do it. It’s just that any of the other eleven months would be better for me.
January seems to be that way for most people and New Year’s Resolutions. I can help with that. I always make almost all my New Year’s goals and keep my resolutions, and many years I do succeed at all of them. The reason 80% of people fail at resolutions is because they structure them wrong, not because they “lack willpower” or whatever sad myth they’re telling themselves. January is just a bogus time to try to start a new project. I’ve been following a structured annual review process of my own devising for several years, which is why I nail my goals and resolutions. Key to this is that I basically spend December laying out my plans, researching and working ahead on some of them, and then I often do nothing at all in January! The main point of my plan is to keep my momentum going in the second half of the year. I schedule quarterly reviews and publish my progress. Imagining the embarrassment of giving up and even forgetting my public commitments is a dark and scary outcome that keeps me from procrastinating. January is only eight percent of the year. If you do nothing at all for the entire month, just lie around in your underwear tossing a baseball toward the ceiling over and over while listening to Van Halen, first of all, invite me over. Second of all, that still leaves you a full 92% of the year to work on the stuff that matters to you, and that’s still an A grade. January sucks for goals, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. It gets dark early, the weather sucks, everyone is broke after the holidays, and what’s more, it’s cold and flu season. The gym is full and yet, paradoxically, everyone is talking about failing at their Resolution. Why would anyone set themselves up for failure like that? Don’t choose a resolution that demands total and perfect adherence forever, with no skipped days. That’s the loser method. You’re absolutely guaranteed to miss days when you try to do anything, from going to work to being nice to your mom or your romantic partner. People don’t even bathe every single day! If a perfect streak is impossible even for easy, fun, desirable things you like to do as often as possible, how could it be possible for something complicated, hard, or scary that you don’t know how to do yet? Perfection is a terrible reason for either a resolution or a goal, for a project of any kind. It means you’ll fail. It means you’ll feel like a loser even though all you did was make up a game that nobody can win. It also means you’ll be cruel and rude to yourself. What’s the point? Just slap yourself in the face and move on. If you start something new on January First, how much progress could you possibly make in one month? Fluency in a foreign language? A total physical transformation? Turning in a book proposal? Um, maybe, but only if you’re a goal maniac with a lot of experience and you like gonzo journalism. Stunt projects can be really fun and inspiring, but the reason for that is that the high likelihood of failure makes it feel both more risky and less important. It’s still funny if you fail, perhaps more so. Check this out. Say you set up a resolution for something you want to do. You do zero in January. You do it 10% of the time in February, which is not even three days out of the month. You do it 20% of the time in March, because you realized it wasn’t that hard and now you know how. You do it 30% of the time in April, because the weather is getting better. You do it 40% of the time in May, 50% of the time in June, and 60% of the time in July. You’re up to 70% of the time in August. In September, you hit 80% of the time, because it’s back-to-school and that makes you feel like working harder. You’re at 90% of the time in October. By November, you’re just doing your resolution all the time, because you’re used to it, and in December, you wish you had chosen a tougher project the previous year. It’s just part of your life now. What is this thing that you’re doing? I dunno, but I do know that you have to choose some way to measure it because otherwise, how would you know whether you won or not? I suspect people often choose resolutions they really want to fail, just for the bonding experience of comparing notes with friends and strangers. Oh ya, I totally tried to quit [eating so much ketchup, hate-watching TV, flirting with my ex]. January is for hibernating, for doing winter the way it’s traditionally done. Wallow in the dark and cold and wish for something better, like more money and more sunny warm opportunities to have fun with your friends. Those are good wishes. Resolutions are good wishes, also, and they’re a really nice opportunity to get more of that wish energy into your life. Simply choose something for the year that interests you and makes you curious, and refuse to start on it until mid-February, when everyone else has already quit. Choose a resolution you can finish in one day, and you automatically get the same bragging rights as the people who choose something more complicated. If you never make resolutions because you “know” you’ll let yourself down, change the rules! You are invited to look over this list of one-day resolutions. Pick one if you think it could make your life better, easier, more fun, or more interesting.
Apply for a passport. If you already have a passport, get it out and check the expiration date. Donate blood. Change all your passwords and find out where you can use dual authentication. Go around and set all your clocks, including the microwave and the dashboard in your vehicle. Throw out everything in your kitchen that is past its expiration date. Throw out any expired medications. Throw out worn-out socks and underwear. Cash in your change jar. Make an appointment to get your teeth cleaned if it’s been more than 6 months. Make sure you’ve had a tetanus shot booster within the last 10 years. Pull out your driver’s license and check to see when it expires. Is it this year? Oh snap. Give back anything you borrowed from someone else. If you have overdue library books, return them. If you quit reading a book because you lost interest, let it go. Give it away or trade it in. Match up the lids with all your pots, pans, travel mugs, and plastic containers. Make a “dump run” and get rid of the broken junk from your garage, yard, or anywhere else it’s piled up. If you have a mending pile, look it over right now and decide to fix it or throw it away. Increase your retirement contribution 1%. Get a free copy of your credit report and check it for errors. Fill out a living will and have it witnessed. Sign up for a first aid/CPR certification class. Set a timer for one hour and spend it cleaning or filing. Go through your email inbox and unsubscribe to as much as possible. Look through your queue of movies and TV episodes and delete anything that no longer interests you. Look at your keys. Are there any you don’t need any more that you can get rid of? Mystery keys you don’t even recognize? Think of any task you’ve been procrastinating for longer than a year. Make the decision to do it this month or let it go. Read The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield. Make a vow not to make negative comments about other people’s resolutions. |
AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
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