New Years Resolutions

For several years now, I’ve believed that ✨ New Years Resolutions ✨ are often a waste of time. It’s too easy to create resolutions that are too difficult to actually achieve: they require long term habit changes, and have a failure point which is easy to use as an excuse to stop.

“I will exercise more” is a bad resolution because it’s too vague to actually do. “I will go to the gym 3 times a week” is a bad resolution because (unless you already do go to the gym that often) it requires a significant change to your habits, and as soon as you miss one gym session you can easily say to yourself “ah I already missed one… missing another won’t be that bad.”

So this year, I am making New Years Resolutions. But they have to fit these criteria:

1. Something I’m already working towards. It can’t be something new.
2. Flexible. Don’t give me an excuse to stop.
3. Actionable. Nothing vague.

My resolution is “I want to spend more time working on things I want to work on.” This goal is something I’ve already been working towards, so that’s the first step done.

The second step is Flexibility: “more time” is too vague on its own, so I’m using Tetris Grand Master’s Cool rules¹:

The number of hours I worked this month has to be at least ⅔ of the number of hours I worked last month. So if I worked for 10 hours last month, then I must work for at least 6 hours, 40 minutes this month.

This system is actually going to be calculated per category, so I need to be improving in all of the categories, rather than focusing on one to the detriment of everything else².

This means that I should gradually improve, but if I have a super productive month, I’m not forced to have equally productive months forever.

The third step is to make it Actionable. Here’s the list of things I want to spend more time on, organised from “easiest” to “hardest”:

• Conlangs. It’s going to be relatively easy to work on tɬɯ́qʈɤ over the next few weeks, as it’s in the forefront of my mind, but the tricky part will be not abandoning it.
• Language Learning. I have several languages I want to learn more of. I’m not aiming for fluency, but I’m aiming for a basic understanding of a few of the languages I’m interested in.
• Music practice. I barely played my accordion at all last year, and I no longer have a piano available to me. I know my skills are getting worse, but I want to get back into it. Optimally, I would be practicing for half an hour a day, but I know that I can’t just suddenly start doing that much.
• Fiction Writing. It’s been a while since I actually finished writing any fiction, I want to spend more time on this. Even if I never publish anything publically, more writing will be good.

In order to kick this off, I need to make sure that in January I do at least 30 minutes of each of the categories. I’ll be using this log to keep track of my progress – at the end of each week, I’ll post an update that lets you know how much I’ve done so far this month.