2023 will be the year I focus on positive development
I have envisioned my life almost entirely as a series of goals, and every other component of my life is tertiary. This year, I want to deprioritize goals in favor of thinking about areas I would like to improve, and moving towards them. This ties into and extends my year of constructing the foundation by way of building positive habits and taking the time to observe what I want to do with my time and prioritizing it that way.
I want to set short term goals when it comes to my professional life and execute them reasonably. I might look into some alternate to-do systems, either within todoist or other applications.
Now that I have built journaling into my life. I want to integrate it into my day more, doing a couple of checkpoints throughout the day, rather than just when I'm about to go to bed. I'm not always the most verbose when I am abt to go to sleep, and I feel like sometimes things can get left out because I don't feel like writing them.
A nice mantra I have been keeping in my mind while I've been living alone is "if there is something small I can do for future me, do it now". It helps as a framing tool to recontextualize chores into an act of self-compassion and caring in a way that helps me feel better and get necessary things done even when I'm struggling with depression.
I feel like I haven't met the goals I've set out for myself yet. I've been really lost the past year or two, but this year especially I feel like I am being pulled in 100 directions by all of the things I want to do.
It's time to set some concrete goals to improve myself.
It's been really hard to find a discipline to follow, as soon as I find something I feel like I am either entranced by something newer and shinier, realize I have no real reason to learn, or I find that it is harder than I expected and lose interest. While reading around I found this article How to Commit to Learning a Language When You Can't Do It Regularly. Seemed like a similar problem to the one I am having of finding it difficult to regiment any kind of learning at the moment. The key ideas here are
set wider time-goals and check ins
This will be a tricky one because I'm currently setting no time goals, when I'm learning something new I just dive into it until I get bored and then move on. I think I will need to spend some considerable time re-learning how to learn.
count everything you do
This is a mindset thing I haven't tried before, mostly because I have a tendancy to always be hard on myself and find reasons to discount my work. Going to add a section to my journal called "what I did", to encourage listing these more often.
two months later and I feel like I am making some progress, I'm making the decision to table some of my long projects for a while (going to resume really working on remenant constructivist either on vacation or when I really want to), and recontextualizing how I view myself.
Had a nice talk with Nat about improving ourselves, and I've realized how I've had a lot of things that are long-term and short-term mixed in my head. She mentioned how one of our mutual co-workers has a punnett square for internal vs external struggles and short vs long term needs. For example making sure you eat breakfast is internal and short term, while wanting to exercise more is internal and long term. It's an interesting mental system, and I want to see if I can integrate any of these ideas into my life.
I've come back to the garden metaphor, thinking of improving my life not as trying to instill habits into my brain from some unknown willpower, to asking as a nuturer. Bodies and lives aren't sculptures, it's futile to try and shape them to your exact desires (which if you are growing will probably be vastly different from when you started). I view my life as a series of branches on a bonsai tree or plots in a garden: maintaining them will help them grow to their fullest potential, but I cannot predict how they will mature.