Happy New Year!

There is the kind of person out in the world who doesn’t see the need for a ‘New Year’s Resolution’ or anything like that. I saw a Facebook post the other day that made fun of celebrating a ‘new year’ when the Earth has only completed 365 days of its 365.25 day orbit – taking leap years into account.

The faulty math aside – it isn’t a 365.25 day orbit – the point is well taken. The truth is that January 1st is actually an arbitrary point in time to mark anything at all – New Year’s Day actually takes 26 hours to happen across the world and by the time the last point on Earth celebrates it, the first point is already recovering from the hangover.

Why Bother With Then?

I can only speak for myself on this one, and I’m assuming that everyone who dismisses the notion of New Year’s Resolutions as – insert your own dismissive adjective – already has their life together and is as successful as they can be.

Congratulations to them. Seriously. I mean, kudos to everyone who has their shit together.

However, that doesn’t describe me in any way. If you’ve been watching me fall behind my own goals with my writing projects, then you’ll have already drawn the same conclusion.

The question becomes why use New Year as opposed to any other arbitrary point in time?

Well, it’s definitive, I know it’s coming and I don’t get to reschedule it because it ends up being inconvenient – that’s the first step into the abyss of inaction.

I have not yet begun to procrastinate.

Sarah Addison Allen

So What Does This Mean for Andrew’s 2020?

I’m going to make a number of changes this year, some are simple, some are fundamental.

I’ll quickly dive into four of them so I won’t bore you. Well, no more than I usually bore you, anyway.

Working.

One thing I’ve learned over the last six months and more is that when your spouse works in a hospital, you don’t get to rely on their schedule and you don’t get to rely on them being around as much as you’d like.

Ordinarily, this shouldn’t prove a problem, but here I’m covering so many bases and I’ve been stretched so thin that I haven’t achieved anything. I’m a big believer in having slack built into your schedule so issues that arise are easier to deal with. Last half of last year, however I’ve been busy from getting up at 05:30 to when the dishes are done and the animals tended in the evening, normally some time between 18:30 and 19:30, depending on Girl Scout nights and other things, with a maximum of four hours a day available for productive work of any kind. That includes trash, groceries and tending to disasters like a burned out oven.

This can’t continue.

I came here to start a homestead, grow healthy organic fruit and veg, and to humanely raise my own meat. Pressures have been so tight that I’ve had to abandon the garden and if I want to continue with the NRCS project, then I’d need to hire a whole lot of help.

I have issues with that, living in a house built by people we paid up to $50/hr, while I worked at Bell for $17/hr.

The other day the wife and I had a coming together discussion in which we realized we’re not playing to our strengths. I know I’m certainly not. The upshot of this is it’s time to drop the idea of making this place an operational homestead, let alone a farm, and get my posterior back into the workforce.

This means that I’ll be job-hunting once the kids are back in school full time, which starts Tuesday.

Writing.

Along with the garden, another thing that got nixed last year was my writing work. Between November and today I managed to complete revision notes for just two chapters of the fourth draft. A lot of that has been due to flying solo in preparations for Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year, and some has been due to the house being less than quiet during the holiday season, so my ideal time for writing has been less than ideal.

With the kids being back in school as of Tuesday, there being no major holiday to prep for, I intend to get my writing time back: for me, the best time to write has always been in the afternoon, once all the immediately necessary chores are complete and before getting the kids off the school bus.

I’ll be sequestering that time back again, my goal being a chapter every day, and I intend to keep this blog and my little panel updated to reflect that.

Being Grateful.

I came across the idea of a Gratitude Journal some time ago.

It seemed garbage.

Then I gave it a half-hearted try, attempting to keep a daily journal with the goal of being positive – as opposed to ‘grateful’ – in the hopes that would have the same effect. It really didn’t, perhaps in part because it’s hard for me to stay positive when I’m fed up – and I’ve been fed up a lot lately.

Then I came across a Kurzgesagt video, ‘An Antidote to Dissatisfaction,’ which currently has over four-and-three-quarter million views. I’ve been impressed with Kurzgesagt videos before and have always considered dissatisfaction to be at the heart of what I call the human condition – the reason humans always strive for more and better things.

I had no idea the video would be about the benefits of Gratitude Journaling.

Well, anyway, Kurzgesagt always strike me as very well sourced and argued, so I figured I’d give it a proper go. I say ‘proper‘ because my experience trying it my way has been a couple orders of magnitude below lacklustre. In fact, I’d go further and say my ‘Positivity Journal’ was an utter failure.

To obviate against the existential risk of simply failing again, I took them up on their gentle sales pitch for a prepared and guided Gratitude Journal experience. The video explicitly states that you don’t need to buy anything, you just need a pen and some paper. Well, I tried that and I buggered it up, so I need help to get it right, apparently.

I’ll be kicking it off starting this week, three times a week, and we’ll see what happens. If it has any positive impact at all, it should prove obvious, given how utterly fed up I’ve been lately.

Rewarding Good Habits.

This is the part I haven’t quite figured out yet.

You might by now think I do nothing but watch YouTube videos, because I’m about to cite another one. The truth is, I’ll watch one or two during a tea-break or meal-break, then leave the autoplay running while I clean up and do dishes. So, there’s my obligatory excuse for this blog post.

I’m referring to this FightMediocrity video – I’ve set the URL to the relevant time point, but the whole thing is worth a watch – which uses the idea of pulling colored marbles from a jar to give a lottery of an instant reward for building a long-term habit.

I like that idea, but I intend to change it a little. Instead of colored marbles, which I could easily see, my intention is to put a ton of cut out pieces of paper, folded up, with either the ‘pat on the back’ on it that the red marbles represent or a specific instant reward on it.

That’s where I haven’t gotten to the details yet – what those rewards should be…

There is more…

…but I’m not going into it for now. That’s plenty for one blog post, I think.

Feel free to comment with your own thoughts.

Up Next…

This upcoming week is the first of three weeks of dry-run, to trial out some of the changes I’m making, so my goal is to report back to this accountability blog with positive answers to the following questions:

1. What have I done to start off the job-hunting effort?
2. I’ll have had four scheduled Writing Hours. Did I make my goal of completing four chapters? (It’ll be okay if I start over)
3. Did I keep up with the Gratitude Journal on all three days?
4. Do I have the Reward Plan set up?

With that, I wish everyone a wonderful New Year, and hope that what’s been going on in the Middle East lately isn’t the 21st Century assassination of Archduke Ferdinand.

Stay warm and have a great week.

Categories: Accountability, Administrative, My Life, NRCS, Personal, Plans & Planning

Tags: 2020, 2020 Vision, Good Habits, Gratitude, Gratitude Journal, New Year