Some new year thoughts

I don't do new year resolutions. There's too much baggage and weight on the concept. I do use any long holiday to consider how my life is working and think about ways to change it, though, and the Christmas holiday is particularly good for that since I've often done a lot of thinking over my long October holiday, tried to put it into practice for a couple of months, and have some results to try to internalize and analyze.

One thing that has been mostly successful over the past couple of months is my plan to multitask less. I used to do this a lot when I was a college student, and shortly thereafter, and I probably could get more done that way. But I've increasingly found that multitasking makes me irritable and frustrated, and having the TV on or other background noise going while I'm doing things really does decrease my productivity and make it harder for me to get things done. So I'm going to continue to watch much less TV, not have sports on regularly on the weekend, and try to focus on doing one thing at a time.

The major challenge for this will be in the evenings, when I often have left-over work that I want to get done, I have reviews that I want to write, and I'm also spending time writing fiction and talking with my friends. It's going to be hard for me to avoid multitasking there and still get things done that I want to do, like writing reviews. This will require more thought.

The other goal I have is to take more definitive weekends. Right now, I'm very overloaded with work projects and non-work projects that I want to do, and I've been packing my weekends too heavily. This has to stop, even if it means that I simply do less and some things (like INN) just won't get done the way that I want them to. I'm tackling this on a few fronts: first, I'm trying to spend less time working on work projects and just letting them take longer. Second, I'm taking Saturday as a day to do things off-line, trying to minimize how much time I spend on the computer and instead catching up on reading, doing the laundry, doing mindless things around the house, playing video games, or watching DVDs. This gives me a recovery day and leaves Sunday for non-work projects if I feel like I have energy. And if I don't have energy, I'm trying to give myself permission to take Sunday off as well, even from non-work projects.

I'm getting back on top of to-do lists. More work projects are heating up, but I'm trying to stick to having more time to myself, more time to pursue non-work things, and therefore work may just have to slip. I've been devoting too much time to work and not enough time to myself the past couple of years, and I've started making that shift after October and it's helped a great deal.

Posted: 2007-01-08 21:06 — Why no comments?

Last spun 2022-02-06 from thread modified 2013-01-04