New Year's Resolution Thread 2023

Akrasia
3

Resolutions!

I think looking a year into the future carries too much uncertainty for me, at least for this year. So I’ll only make one New Year’s Resolution, and that’s to set at least three goals/resolutions for each season. Except for 2022-2023 winter, which I’ll set right now, the others need to be set in the last two weeks of the preceding season. So my schedule—I’ll just post updates here, if you don’t mind, @poisson (if you do, I can make my own thread! :smiley:)—is:

  • Today: set winter goals
  • 2023-03-05 – 2023-03-19: set spring goals
  • 2023-06-06 – 2023-06-20: set summer goals
  • 2023-09-08 – 2023-09-22: set autumn goals
  • 2023-12-06 – 2023-12-20: decide if I’m going to do this again for the next year, and if so, set winter goals

To hold myself to those dates, I’ve just set up a metagoal, seasonal-goals[bmndr]. I get a +1 for writing the new goal in the comment of the datapoint and I have to write it here (or my journal thread, or somewhere public).

In the spirit of bughunts past[LessWrong], here’s some things to improve that come to mind that might be good candidates for turning into resolutions:

  1. Be better at setting beeminder breaks far enough ahead of trips, vacations, &c. I already started trying to improve this by adding a “upcoming breaks” section to my journal thread[forum], but that’s only because I started thinking about seasonal resolutions last night.
  2. I’m pretty happy about general cleanliness, but my desk specifically stays too messy for too long.
  3. I “have” too many hobbies, with “have” in scare-quotes there because what I actually have too much of is gear & tools for hobbies I’m realistically not going to back to but am lugging around “just in case”. I’ve had an entry to start cracking on this in my GTD actions list for months and it just keeps drifting lower and lower and lower…
  4. On a related note, come to think of it, my GTD actions list is steadily increasing in depth and I’m starting to get worried about losing important but unpleasant tasks deep in it, which rather defeats the whole point.
  5. My wife and I have been talking about taking tennis lessons together since last spring and haven’t made any progress towards it.
  6. I want to grow more plants but am out of convenient places with good sunlight.

I think (1) doesn’t need to be a whole resolution: I already wrote “fill out the breaks section” in the fine print of my calendial[bmndr] goal, so it’s pre-enforced. (6) might turn into something around summer-goal-time, possibly: we’re currently house-hunting, and our apartment’s lease is up in June, so I don’t want to spend too much time worrying about my physical environment if it’s not a real problem.

(4) gives me an idea for a new reporter script, but I want to get my storygraph individual-book one packaged up neatly and published first, then tidy up my beenary website userscript, then work on the reporter for GTD action depth. That said, I might should create a goal to keep up with doing Weekly Review so I at least scan through the whole list more regularly and archive stale tasks or move them to “someday/maybe” or something. Plus, attacking (4) feels like it might generalize to solving (3) and (5), since they’re sort of “specific task”-style goals.

So, in terms of concrete winter resolutions:

  1. Keep desk more clean. Tracked in a new goal: cleandesk!
  2. Improve rate of handling tasks in my Next Actions list. It’s a big fuzzy problem, but I’ll start by enforcing a more regular & frequent Weekly Review process with a new weekly-review goal and see how it goes.
  3. Sign up for a tennis lesson with my wife sometime before the start of spring. The lesson can be in spring or summer as long as the signing up happens this season. Even though I’m hoping “more weekly review” would make this happen organically, I want it to happen strongly enough that I’m pulling it out into its specific resolution.
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