A Different Type of Resolution
The ending of a year is the busiest time off around. With family and friends gathering for celebration there hardly seems time to relax.
Then a lull hits, the post celebration return to normal. A time when work is slow and the world is waking back up from a 2 week slumber. A time when reflection and resolution cover the new year in a fresh coat of paint.
But I propose a different tactic this year. Rather than look forward to what’s next, take this time to look back. Reflect on 2023, reliving the good and learning from the bad. It’s in this reflection when a shift can start, changing present behaviors based on outcomes of past actions.
If you need some help getting started, take a piece of paper and write down the months, leaving plenty of space between them. Start with what happened each month. This doesn’t need to be everything, just the key activities in those months, starting with the big memories, but recalling the small habits you kept alive.
For each activity write down it’s impact on you. Did that memory make you smile or frown? Was the habit worth the time invested, bringing you joy or closer to your goal? Which of those things had a negative impact?
When you’re all done look at the whole list and decide what should be repeated in the new year and what should be stopped.
This will be hard, but take out your critical lens and really analyze your activities, especially those you continued to do all year in the hopes of a payoff and see if they did.
For me, my Friday Updates were one of those hard choices. It’s a short blog written once a week to inform my audience what I’m doing. It was also a way to build my website and force myself to practice writing, but the return was low. Very few visitors come to my site for the Friday Updates. What I’m seeing is greater benefit to the community in teaching blogs, sharing concepts of woodworking and answering questions.
When I zoom out and look at the time in, roughly 100 hours, and check my statistics, which are low, I have to make the tough decision to discontinue the Friday Updates so I can reallocate my time toward higher value tasks.
But that’s okay. The Friday Updates were a challenge to myself. They were a reason to write and build the discipline to sit down and create a blog a week. The intention was to build the website and to become a better writer in the progress.
So you might be wondering, where will that time go?
You may know I also make videos which I post on YouTube. I’ve leaned into a style for those videos which rely on a script and scripting takes a lot of time. Between the planning, the writing, the editing to a script. The entire process is much more time consuming which means I’ll need to steal it from somewhere.
So stay tuned for the 2024 shifts in what I’m doing, and share what your shifts will be in a comment below. I’d love to hear them and support you in your journey.