Happy New Month!

I write a lot. Probably more than most people, I would guess. In addition to this blog, I write pretty extensively for my work and I end up writing a lot of short essays for clients or publications as well.

In addition, I’m writing a book (even though progress got a lot slower due to changes in my work schedule and then a global pandemic changing how my days are organized, the draft is actually 80%-90% finished).

I really love to write, but despite how much writing I do, the amount of writing I don’t do absolutely dwarfs it.

The number of pages I have filled with ideas that have never become more is staggering. The biggest category of these is creative writing projects.

My writing focuses on essays and non-fiction, but I have a great love of literature and always have (fun fact about me: I have five tattoos, and all are quotes from works of fiction). Over the years I’ve done a lot of creative writing – short stories, novellas, even prose. Mostly just for myself. The bug bites me and the only way to fix it is to pour some words on pages for a while.

So this month’s resolution is to engage seriously with that process and try to do more than just scribble in a notebook. If I end up with something readable, I’ll let you know.

Happy New Month!

Last month’s goal was fun and fulfilling. I made several small improvements, most of which would be boring to you – things like how I organized my tools, how I took notes, how I scheduled my day. But it was fun thinking about those things which had been defaults for so long, and the end result is definitely an improvement.

This month I have an interesting challenge, a little game I’m going to play. I’m taking $500 and putting it into a special account, and my goal is to see how much money I can turn it into by the end of the month. My goal is at least $1,000. Here are the rules though:

1. I can’t add more money to the account from my regular income sources. It would be cheating to just treat this like a savings account and call it a day.
2. I can’t directly sell labor time for this project. For instance, I can buy a table, paint it, and resell it for more – that’s okay, because the thing I’m selling to the end customer is the table, not my “painting services” or whatnot. I won’t, for example, paint someone’s deck for a fee.
3. Hiring other people is allowed, though. So I can’t mow a lawn for money, but I can take a lawn-mowing contract for $120, hire someone else to do it for $80, and put the remaining $40 in the account. That’s fair.
4. If I need any specialized tools, equipment, expenses, etc. as a result of whatever I come up with, they have to come from the initial $500. No outside bolstering once the game is started. That includes even things like gas & tolls, too!

So that’s it. For the purpose of this game, I essentially only have $500 to my name, and I can’t sell my labor time directly (I *do* still have a full-time job, so even if I wanted to sell time I don’t exactly have an abundance to sell).

This idea came about because my oldest daughter has been negotiating her rates with me for her allowance, and we got on the subject of what she might buy with the money. She had some great ideas, but also asked for suggestions. I told her the best thing you can buy with money is more money – buy things you can resell.

She absolutely ate this advice up, so I’m going to include her in the game. I’ll cut her in on the profits, too!

Happy New Month!

An interesting, happy-yet-unexpected outcome of last month’s resolutions for me – I achieved both, but not in the sense that I was looking for. I resolved to build a big thing and change a big opinion. Instead, I built a ton of little things and changed a ton of little opinions.

Here’s why I like that – making those things my resolutions for the month set my brain to the task of looking for opportunities to do so, and those opportunities weren’t all big. But I took them anyway, thinking that one of them might turn out big by the end. None of them were groundbreaking, but the end result is just a consistent pattern of behavior rather than single spikes, and I’m very happy with that.

So that’s my resolution this month – to quantify small changes, at least 5, that improve my life. Nothing groundbreaking, but I want to tweak the dials a little on my various habits. Baby steps to a better world.

Have a fantastic month, everyone!

Happy New Month!

I have two resolutions this month.

Resolution the First: I want to revisit my “build something” resolution from my very first New Month’s Resolution post, which was… July of last year? That can’t be right. Have I been writing this long? Anyway, that’s what I want to do this month – build something. Something physical, with my hands. Whether that means assembling a kit or building something from scratch doesn’t matter. I just want to hold objects in my hands and make them take a more orderly shape.

Resolution the Second: I want to be swayed. I want to find an opinion I hold and learn enough to change it, whether it’s from my own research or a compelling argument by someone with a different opinion. This happens accidentally all the time, but I want to see what it’s like to just purposely go find a better way of thinking about something.

Good luck with your own resolutions!

Happy New Month!

I’m willing to bet that a lot of people had their plans disrupted in the last few months. That’s okay – if you’re like me, you’ve been focusing on survival and adaptability, bending so you don’t break. Resiliency is a good trait to practice, and there’s no time like the present.

I’m happy to say I accomplished my April resolution, which was to survive until May. Now that I feel like I have some of my footing back, I’m ready to engage with a new, more ambitious resolution for this month.

I am surrounded by geniuses – the people I interact with in my job and in the channels that run outward from that job are all fantastic experts in various fields. What’s more, those fields are often very valuable to me and those people are often giving away that value left and right. They’re writing blogs and articles, doing webinars, offering pro bono services.

Despite this, I’m often so wrapped up in what I’m doing (even those same things!) that I don’t appreciate that value flowing all around me, and struggle with the very problems they’re trying to solve.

So my resolution for May is to take a deep breath and dive into the sea of genius all around me. To let people help me that want to. It’s more challenging than it might seem for me to do this – seeking help, even accepting help, has never been my strong suit. But that’s why it’s a resolution.

I wish you all the best of luck with yours!

Happy New Month!

So last month my resolution was to try to form a better morning routine. Well, for anyone reading this in the future, last month the world also ended.

I mean it didn’t really, but to say that there’s been some upheaval would be a pretty major understatement.

So my sleep schedule hasn’t gotten much better. There’s a lot of noise in a house with three kids, especially if those kids generally can’t leave and are crawling up the walls. But that’s okay – we roll with those punches. Life won’t always stay neatly packaged, and that’s the beauty of the “New Month’s Resolution” paradigm instead of “New Year’s.” You only lose 1/12th of the time & momentum when you need to make a pivot.

So here’s my resolution for April – survive. Keep my kids’ lives as normal as possible given the disruption, finding things to do with them despite the challenges. Get outside with them as much as possible while still being safe and dry (oh yeah, on top of everything else, this is major rainy season where I live). Things will return to baseline, as long as we stay sane. So that’s what I’m planning to do.

Stay safe, everyone.

Happy New Month!

I got my biggest goal of February accomplished – a camping trip with my oldest daughter. I made it her birthday present, along with spending far more money than I’d intended setting her up with her own set of camping gear. It was outstanding; I love the outdoors when I can really go experience it and enjoy it, and I did.

This month I’m resolving to get a better morning routine. My sleep schedule is consistently borked, and that often results in me having disorganized mornings where I focus on getting tasks started but do nothing to get myself started, if that makes sense. I’m going to try to put a more conscious effort into that first hour upon waking, change up what I’m doing with it, and try to make it both healthier and more efficient.

Any tips are appreciated!

Happy New Month!

Okay, January was mostly successful! I’m back to both working out and reading on a regular schedule, which is nice. The blog remains consistent. Work is intense and getting more so, but it feels like in a healthy way and I’m certainly enjoying it. And I’ve actually managed to get some social time in – a whole night of getting together with some old friends!

My book is not done. I’m off-track, no denying it. I work with an amazing writing mentor, and I’ve got meetings scheduled with her to help me get back on track. Sometimes you have to outsource!

Otherwise though, I’m more or less back to baseline, which means I can put a real goal on the books for February. I’d like to get back out into nature at least once this month for another backpacking excursion. I enjoyed my last one so much, and this is still the kind of weather I really enjoy (I don’t like doing anything outside when it’s hot, but I love being outside in the cold). So that’s the resolution – one overnight trip.

Maybe I’ll pack a bag and bring my oldest this time. Depends on her interest, but I think she’ll enjoy it. Wish me (or us!) luck!

I stand by my assertion that new year’s resolutions are bunk.

But I still like my new month’s resolutions, and January is a month, so here we are.

December was ridiculous, for a wide variety of reasons. I made several miscalculations, but also a number of successes. I’m going to talk about them!

1. I didn’t completely finish my book, though I’m super close. Honestly, I just didn’t realize how much people demand your time during the holidays. I took a reasonable amount of time off from work, but it ended up being like trying to empty a glass while you’re underwater – something else just immediately rushes in to fill it. This won’t really come up again until next year, but next December I want to be a lot more assertive about asking the people around me to respect the time I’m trying to devote to things. I know I’m a huge Scrooge McGrinch, but I just dislike how “the holidays” are basically just a bunch of days in a row whose only purpose is to disrupt my careful routines.
2. While I didn’t wrap up 100% of my other projects, I did wrap 95% of them, and I think that I’ll have the rest done by the time I go back to work on the 6th. I’ll take it.
3. I’m happy to say I’ve obtained some better equipment for my workout routine, and once I’m back in my own home I’ll have my new routine started! (I’m out of town until the 4th, but I’ll accept that too.)

So, what are my resolutions for January?

1. First, tie all those little loose ends from December’s resolutions.
2. A ramp-up resolution: By the end of the month, I want to be back to reading 30 minutes every day and working out every day. Since I happen to be starting the month on vacation and then wrapping up these other projects, I don’t want to set a standard that I’ll immediately fail to meet. My schedule for these is as follows: as soon as I’m home from vacation I’ll start back into the workouts, and as soon as I’m not devoting time every day to writing a book I’ll immediately transition that time over to reading them again. In addition to new exercise equipment, I’ve also obtained quite a backlog of books I’m super excited to dive into!
3. I want to spend more time doing organized social activities with people outside my normal circles. I’m terrible at casual hangouts, but I could do like a board game night or something, and I intend to.

My goals for January, taken together, look a lot like “return to baseline.” That’s pretty accurate, and that’s okay. A wise man once told me that sometimes you have zero days, but too many people try to counteract those with “hero days,” where they pile stuff onto their plate in order to try to scramble and make up for lost time. But that’s a recipe for disaster; the better thing to do is just focus on having “non-zero days,” where you make forward progress. If January has to be dedicated to that mindset, then I’ll be happy to do it.

November was a fast-paced month with many changes. I believe I accomplished my goal of “hitting the ground running” in my new role at work, which has been incredibly rewarding. I work on an absolutely amazing and supportive team, and it’s a great environment in which to do good work.

That being said, there were definitely a few setbacks overall, some of which were expected and some of which weren’t, and that’s making me re-evaluate my plan for the last 31 days of the year.

1. I did get a lot of reading done, but the pattern changed significantly. Most of the time I don’t read one book at a time; when I had physical books there used to be a dozen with bookmarks in them on various end tables throughout my house at any given time. Thank goodness for my Kindle. So if I read 4 books in a month, it’s not because I read one per week. Rather, I’d read one for 30 minutes, another for an hour, 4 chapters of a different one, back to the second one for a few pages, etc. Because of this, I’ve come to notice certain patterns in my reading – the more books I have “open” at any given time, the more deeply (ironically!) I’m diving into a specific topic. If I only have a few, I’m reading casually, but many means I’m trying to absorb everything about a topic. That’s what this month has been like. Still, I’m scaling down my reading requirements for December, because I have so many projects on my plate – some days it was very hard to get 30 minutes to myself to read.
2. The schedule I’d tried to set for myself with work isn’t going exactly according to plan. Without going into too much detail, I essentially now wear two different hats at my job – I still do my old job, but have also taken on the responsibilities of the new role. I tried to segment the two into different days of the week, but the two sets of responsibilities just don’t want to be organized that way, so I’m going to re-evaluate that. Dividing up the day into segmented hour blocks will probably work better than dividing up the week.
3. The holidays! I never seem to remember just how disruptive they’ll be, but I lose lots of time during them. Maybe it’s because for the last several years, my growing family has meant that each year’s holiday season has actually been significantly more hectic than the prior year’s, so I’m caught off-guard each time. I don’t really have a good solution to this one, other than to remember that there are actually only like 4 working days in December, apparently.

So here are my resolutions for December:

1. Finish the rough draft for my book. Extremely doable based on my pace, but I have to be aware of which days actually allow for writing.
2. Wrap up all my other projects so that going into January I have a clean slate to take on more. That includes both personal projects and my current work assignment.
3. Research a more intense work-out/exercise regimen for January. I like mine, but I’ve sort of plateaued on it, and I want to have something new to implement right away after this month.

This is a great month for resolutions. It’s too easy to put things off and say you’ll make them New Year’s Resolutions, but my first version of this post was me talking about why that’s bunk. If it’s worth doing, do it today.