I’m a little late to the party on the “what I’m doing differently this year” posts that I read every year, largely due to the fact that I try to spend every New Year’s Day completely unplugged. I consider this one a success.
I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions, mainly because I hate the idea of waiting until an arbitrary time to better myself. Self-improvement is a constant evolution, and has to happen now. “The diet starts Monday,” is just procrastination.
Instead, I like to take the New Year to reboot. We (or at least, I) tend to put a lot of things on autopilot. It works fine for a while depending on what you’re automating, but it always leads to entropy. The first week of January represents to me a hard reboot on everything in my life – my house, my finances, my relationships, my calendar – everything.
I try to take some time to reach out to friends I haven’t spoken to in too long. I update my calendar, my project lists, re-evalutate long term goals, re-evaluate my budgets and try to start the year fresh. Of course, I do some of these things multiple times during the year, but there is something cathartic about doing it all at once. It means starting the new year fresh and clean, and making this year even better than the last.
It’s that clean slate that allows us to temporarily remove the stress of entropy, and to focus on improvement.
Faulkner said, “always dream and shoot higher than you know how to. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.”
This reboot is an annual sweeping away of the cobwebs – one that allows me to shoot higher, and to attempt to be better than myself. That’s a resolution I intend to keep well past February.
