Progress Update – 2023 Week 4
It’s been a very Meta week
I’ll say more below. First, a walk through my current goals — some of them for the last time.
Am I making enough progress on my foreign languages?
Based on my intent when I created this goal: no. So I’m taking the $5 hit. I’m also archiving the goal, because this is a sunk-cost goal and a wishful-thinking goal and an ignore-life-changes goal. Much as I would like to become fluent in Spanish, French, German and Mandarin, the plan to do that is one I made when I thought maybe my sabbatical was maybe turning into retirement. I was looking for a big, interesting project to sink my teeth into, now that I had time galore. All that changed when I decided to get a degree in linguistics, and to return to full-time work while waiting for the fall semester to start. I do not and will not have time galore for other projects, and no amount of expert planning and wanting-to will change that. This is wisdom born of long, hard experience. It saddens me to drop these goals, and I’m continuously having to remind myself that this is not laming out or failing or being flighty or any of those other terrible things I tell myself. That voice is not my voice; it’s the voice of my childhood bullies, adapting its broken-record message to the current situation. [0] The truth is, this is the sane, self-honoring, grownup thing to do (in the best of ways). There are things more important to me, and something has to go.
Am I doing enough to stay healthy?
Based on my intent when I created this goal: no. So I’m taking the $10 hit. I’m also archiving it (more on that in the Changes section below). This goal, too, suffers from wishful thinking. When I return to work on Feb 1, I’ll have natural moments for walking: 35 minutes to the train station, and 35 minutes back at the end of the day. I was trying to force myself into that rhythm earlier, and its artificiality chafed. I dropped back to just one walk a day last week, but even that was hard to maintain. As for resistance training, I was ideal-worlding-wishful-thinking myself into daily sessions, when twice a week is enough. All this is valuable insight, and the derail affirms that I still have work to do on excising wishful thinking from my plans. That is: I did not refuse to do my good and thoughtful plan; I created a plan that wasn’t yet good and thoughtful, and my resistance to doing it was a sign to reconsider. This is great progress! And powerful.
Am I thriving at church?
Yes. Archiving it now (more on that below).
Is anything falling through the cracks?
No.
Am I feeling overwhelmed?
No.
Changes
Simplicity works best for me, I’ve learned through decades of experience. I’m prone to develop complex systems and plans, but that doesn’t mean I’m bound to them. Setting up systems is like writing: you throw everything that’s in your head at the page, then gradually cut out the chaff until it becomes incisive and beautiful.
For my Beeminder goals, that means this: everything essential I want to track is already covered in the Overwhelm and Fall Thru Cracks goals. If the answers to those are “yes” some week, the answer to “how can I fix that” will invariably cover all of the concrete projects and life areas I have. So I’m archiving all my “Am I thriving / doing enough in area X” goals, and Overwhelm and Fall Thru Cracks will be the only two that I review here weekly like this. I’m also archiving my Meta Review goal, which tracked whether I answered all of my questions. With only two left, Meta Review is overkill.
Other system changes
My Things setup was, predictably, becoming unwieldy. Much as my organizational mind loves GTD, it doesn’t work for me in practice. All that capturing and organizing starts to feel like clutter and government bureaucracy, and my focus narrows to whatever’s on my task list and I lose all flexibility. This is not to say there’s anything wrong with GTD, only to say that it isn’t the right paradigm for me. My other bugaboo is the desire for One Ring To Rule Them All. It feels like simplicity to have one system do all the things, but it invariably turns into head-clutter for me.
My system is still in flux, but here’s what I’ve currently worked out:
- I’ll use Apple’s Calendar for actual appointments.
- I’ll use Apple’s Reminders for recurring tasks. A Weekly list and a Monthly list with must-do (MVS) cleaning, budgeting, and other household stuff, plus essential meta work (such as this weekly review). I will not check off these tasks; I’ll just move them to the bottom of their respective lists when I do them, and add a “last done:” date in the notes for the Monthly tasks. These are the Category 1 tasks I wrote about earlier this year: I don’t need any tracking or rewards (checkbox checked!) for them, but I do want a list that ensures I don’t forget any of these specific things for too long.
- I’ll use Things as a capture system for ideas, thoughts, and to-dos that I don’t want to forget while I’m busy on something else. It’s perfect for things like “Books to Read” and “Gift Ideas” and “Recipes to Try” type lists. I’ll also use it for time-sensitive non-routine tasks (eg, “remember to renew my passport before the end of September”).
- I’ll use pen & paper or Notion for working out these captured ideas and thoughts into something bigger, when and if I decide that’s what I want to do.
- I’ll use Beeminder to track life-critical habits and projects, and only those. In addition to my meta Overwhelm and Fall Thru Cracks goals, I’ll be creating some new ones to track concrete projects (more on those next week).
A critical workability factor here is that these systems each do One Thing Only, and their domains are disjoint (non-overlapping). All Reminders does is tell me about my weekly and monthly routines. All Things does is capture thoughts for later perusal, and put the thoughts that are time sensitive in front of me at the right moment. All Notion / pen & paper do is give me a place to ramble out loud and move thoughts around until I’ve thought them through as much as I’d like to. All Beeminder does is tell me what’s truly important to me. If I ignored all my other systems, I’d still be on track (but with a messy house and an expired passport). If I ignored anything in Beeminder, I wouldn’t be on track.
Said another way: everything that is merely helpful, or aspirational, or potential, or nebulous but worth a later look-see is in one of the first three systems. Everything essential to being who I want to be is in Beeminder. It will, of course, be paramount to keep this division in place. As I said above, more on this next week — it’s time to start getting ready for the day here.
FOOTNOTES
[0] The bullies’ voice is so much fainter than it used to be, and it has almost none of the sting it used to — the marvelous result of having finally seen it for what it was last year. Instant deactivation. What’s left is more like an echo. It’s been so much easier to see through its falsity this time around.