About New Year Resolutions…
So, I will be honest, I still make New Year Resolutions… despite failing at them time and again, I am still that hopeless Optimist or delusional chick, if you prefer, who thinks making a list will somehow improve her as a person or at the very least bring me one step closer to her Goals.
It is not that I have not seen the mental health videos, which tell you to stop expecting overnight changes. On the top of all that, I can from my own personal experience at the very least see the futility of all that effort, which goes into making Bullet Journals. I am what you might call “moody”, which is one of the most banal way of describing my sudden bursts of motivation and enthusiasm interrupted by periods of laziness. So there will be that one week in 2 months, when my house would be cleaned the point of it looking like a fairy tale cottage or when I would obsessively learn a new skill (last year it was knitting) or a day when I would bake a cake, cook three meals and still have time left for some studying. You would see me in one of these periods and you would think, “Man, is there anything, that girl cannot do” and of course since it is during these periods, that I am the most active socially… most of my friends, do tend to think I am a very active busy bee, who cannot stay still. But of course, there are weeks in between these active bursts, when I would be sitting in my corner of the living room, binging on Netflix… trying to find ways to get out of cooking or cleaning or any productive activity.
Needless to say, I am the worst person to be making a New Year Resolutions list. Because in that enthusiasm of “new year-new me” I overcommit and of course fail, like all the studies suggest. Also, being extremely self aware, I keep a handy list of excuses, my favorite one being “Lists are aspirational, so overreaching and underachieving is a part of the process…”
Why keep trying though?
So the simplest answer is probably, that I love making lists. There is nothing I enjoy more than making a list and of course finishing it is another hit on the pleasure center but honestly just the act of writing down what you want is therapeutic. But if we get into the whys for 2021 and why am I serious enough this time to commit to these online with public eye on me (ok, I know, I have barely 6 readers, but still…), it is because I think I might have reached the limit of how far I can push this 1 part active 3 Parts lazy lifestyle of mine.
It truly does have its advantages, especially when you are a student. You can use that active burst of energy to reach your peak potential when an exam is around the corner. It also helps when you have short term targets, like planning a wedding or preparing the house for a party. But this hustle reveals its weaknesses when you are living with someone, who looks to you for partnership, not 1/4 of the time but all the time or when those high pressure targets become rarer and rarer. Basically adulting is tough and I am not making it any easier by my inconsistency.
The Question is of course, how to hack the list making, in such a way, that a minimum of work gets done everyday. That instead of it being another one of those things that you try for a month and give up on, it becomes a habit…
I wish I could say I have a ready answer, but what I have decided to do this year is to make a logbook. An old-fashioned list of things I could possibly do in a day, “Studying, Singing, Dancing, Reading, Exercising, Cooking, Cleaning etc.” To be even more cautious, I did one week trial Run-through of just logging things without any particular goal, to have a baseline. So without any particular number set in my head, I danced once during the entire week and spent no time exercising (shocker, lol).
The idea is to slowly escalate the goals and change or optimize them weekly. If a particular set of numbers, for eg. reading thrice a week, writing once a week, seems to work well, then those can be continued onto the next week and the same way if something is absolutely not working, maybe tweaking the frequency will provide realistic goals and would help maintaining that activity. Of course, I know, there are a hundred Apps which are designed to make you develop new habits. But the problem for me is that I don’t necessarily know which activities I should concentrate on and also what is really practical with my work schedule. There is also that added problem of me loving lists and needing a reason to put tick marks on a notebook. But better to leave that for a trained professional to unravel.
Will this version of new year new me work? I certainly hope so, or I would feel particularly embarrassed next year, reading this old post from 2021. Also since, this is a very layered experiment on my own Psyche… I really hope I have at least figured myself out a tiny little bit, to know what works as a motivator for me. So, in a way, even writing this out and publishing it is a last ditch effort to reach the next level of adulting. In this entire process, if it makes anyone reading this try this very crude method of optimizing the 24 hours that life hands out to you everyday, that will be a wonderful bonus.
If it doesn’t work… well, you know, lists are supposed to aspirational anyway…
