I hope everyone had a restful holiday and is well settled back into normal life.
This can be a hard time of year. After the holidays, returning to work and all the ordinary routines can be a drag at best. Some years I’ve felt like every morning I walked through the office door, a year’s life force was sucked away, until a few weeks passed and numbness and apathy re-formed as a protective layer between me and my life.
That feeling sucks, but it can be channeled into a good opportunity to re-evaluate your life. I know there’s nothing more trite or cliché than examining your life at the new year, but hey, if you never do anything that’s popular or common, you’re no more independent than if you always do everything that’s popular or common. Either way, the fads are controlling what you do.
So here goes. Life is short (it’s down to 16,714 for me)–it’s good to check often and make sure you’re headed in the right direction.
Here’s what I suggest thinking about:
- What you like about your life. Love your kids, your hobbies, your routine of watching the sun rise every morning? When you feel best, what are you doing? What’s working well for you? How can you make those things a bigger percentage of your life/time?
- What you don’t like about your life. Hate your job, your alarm clock, your commute, that committee you signed up for? What do you dread? What wastes your time? What makes you feel stressed, annoyed, bored, or discouraged? How can you eliminate or ameliorate these things?
- What went well last year. What did you accomplish? What did you enjoy?
- What went badly last year. What would you have done differently? What can you learn from what happened?
- What’s holding you back. What activities, relationships, obligations, or beliefs are obstacles to becoming your best self and doing what you want to do? How can you get around them or get rid of them?
- Goals/plans/dreams for 2011 How can you make the most of 2011? What do you want to do? How do you want to spend your time? How would you like to grow?
I think it’s valuable to think about these things at least once a year, if not more often. It’s easy to set a course, start off well, go on autopilot, and wake up months later to find you’ve drifted away from where you wanted to go, or something isn’t working as well as expected, or maybe you really want to go somewhere else after all. Better to figure it out than keep on drifting.
In fact, I recommend writing the answers down. This way, it’s harder to brush off with vague or facile answers to the hard (=important) questions, and you can look back on it later. Also, for me, the act of writing forces me to get my thoughts in order, often revealing answers or insights that I wasn’t consciously aware of before.
To show I’m not all talk, I’ll go first.
What you like about your life
Writing. Being home in my own quiet house. Sleeping under the down comforter on cold nights. Solitude. Early mornings when I feel wild, unfounded euphoria. Walking in the woods. Working on things I care about to the point where I lose myself for hours in what I’m doing. Driving with the top down, particularly on winding mountain roads. Talking or emailing with friends and family—those conversations when you’re truly heard and cared about, and the other person lets you see the world through their eyes, too. Fuzzing time with my kitty cat. Opening all the windows in the spring and fall to let the fresh breezes blow through the house. Dancing in the rain.
To make these a bigger part of my life, I think the key will be to do them first. I’ve already eliminated or scaled back most of the time-wasters and hated obligations in my life; now it’s mostly fine-tuning, with one exception: my day job. If I can support myself enough to eliminate that, I will have more time for the things I love, especially writing. I’m actually liking my job pretty well right now, but the schedule/structure of having to be there at certain times is still a hindrance. My absolute best times are the times when I’m in flow state for hours a day working on things I care about and totally lose track of the outside world’s suggested schedule–eating and sleeping when I happen to surface, not when The Man says it’s time.
What you don’t like about your life.
Scheduling. Conversations where I’m present but not listened to. Tiredness and apathy. Debt. Baggage. Wasting time. The phone ringing. (Oh, how I hate the phone ringing!) People clinging on me and trying to make their problems my problems. Negativity. Gloom. Procrastination. Burnout.
I’ve had a really hard time being positive and cheery for the past month or so, and I’m really tired of it. Normally I scorn the whole New Year’s Resolution thing—what is the point, when every year I have the same resolutions: keep the house cleaner, get in shape, and quit being such a fucking potty mouth. But this gloom business has to stop. The one thing that has the quickest and most intense impact for me is walking outside in nature in the daylight. So I hereby resolve to do that every weekday. I don’t know why I keep falling off the wagon on this when I know it makes me feel better—it’s ridiculous. I guess this is one area where I’m still putting on my own oxygen mask last.
For the dread, apathy, tiredness, boredom, and procrastination, I’m getting serious about doing my most important tasks first. In particular, The Power of Less
For burnout, I’m going to insist on more rest and more solitude. I don’t give my mind enough time to wander. I’m trying to do a lot of things, and even though I love them, if I never rest, eventually all I’ll want to do is rest. My last passion business was a yarn-dyeing business, and I worked on it day and night (meanwhile working full-time at my day job, too). I loved everything about yarn, but after about a year, I realized that what I wanted more than anything, way more than I wanted to play with yarn or have a business, was time off to rest. So that’s what I did, and I still haven’t been back. It would really suck to kill my writing that way, too. Rest, spacing out, and time off are essential.
Also, I’m quitting the phone (or at least, answering it when it rings). I’m changing my outgoing message to say I’m taking a break from the phone, and turning off the ringer. If someone leaves a message, I can still respond to them in my own time, but the degree to which the ringing phone has been stressing me out is completely ridiculous and way out of proportion. It just made #1 on my to-quit list–it’s gone.
What went well last year
- I started this blog.
- My post on optimism was featured on Freshly Pressed.
- I got inspired by a bunch of minimalist bloggers and finished setting up my house—after living here a year, I still had boxes and homeless items everywhere. I unpacked, organized, weeded, and gave away, and I finished some major projects around the house, so now it’s truly a peaceful haven.
- I had my favorite family vacation ever with my family in a farmhouse in Pennsylvania.
- I took two weeks off in the summer and went to the Adirondacks. Taking two weeks away from all of my normal responsibilities was incredible; between that and the gorgeous setting, I returned relaxed and supercharged with energy that lasted for months after.
- I wrote an ebook. I got super excited about happiness and how it works, and this project took over my life for a month or so. I really enjoyed writing it and was exceedingly gratified to finish. Of course, it’s not really finished—it’s still waiting for me to finish editing it, do the layout, and release it. But the writing itself took less than a month, despite so many other competing priorities, which I think is awesome.
- I finished Affiliate Marketing for Beginners and built my first niche site. I was really intimidated by starting this and put off working on it for months, but when I finally did it, I discovered the work itself is pretty easy and fun. I still need to work on backlinks and follow-through to get results, but there is nothing scary about affiliate marketing.
- I took two weeks off from my day job to do a trial run of writing and niche site building full time. I loved it, and I got a ton of work done. Once I got going, I was spending three or four multi-hour sessions per day deep in the flow state. What a rush!
- Every year since I stopped teaching, I’ve said to myself “this nonsense of working in the summer has to go—I’m saving up for the summer off next year!” and every year, I’ve failed to do it. Not this time. I set up my freedom fund, figured out how much I need, and started sending the money directly to it from every pay check.
What went badly last year
- I procrastinated way too much. It was six months from the time I thought of the blog idea and knew I wanted to do it, to when I actually started it. It was three months from when I bought Affiliate Marketing for Beginners to when I actually built my first site. I gave myself a lot of unnecessary dread at work by putting things off and then having to rush to finish them at the last minute.
I know getting started is the hardest part of anything for me, so I want to practice jumping into things, especially when I’m intimidated, with any tiny first step.
- I didn’t take my dreams seriously enough. I have a tendency to get really infatuated with things and then drop them, so it’s kind of hard to take my pursuits seriously, but if it’s important to me, it’s important. That is enough that something is worthy of being taken seriously.
- I still have loose ends from my now-defunct marriage that need to be tied up, notably a jointly owned house needing to be sold. That sucked up a lot of time and money that I was unhappy to part with last year, and it still isn’t finished. I did the best I could on it, but it still sucks. All I can do with that is continue orchestrating the activities that are conducive to the house selling, and otherwise, chill. Angst helps nothing.
- I spent a bucket of money that I really didn’t have on replacement windows for my house. Now I have no emergency fund, and I’ll be paying off debt on these windows until April. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and I’m happy about energy efficiency, the tax credit, and replacing my crappy old windows with ones that look pretty and open and close in all seasons, but dang is it screwing up my finances until then. If I had thought back then about taking the summer off, no way would I have bought them. What can I learn from this? My formerly inviolable rule was right and should go back to being inviolable: don’t spend money you don’t have.
- I let a lot of my relationships get stagnant. I like the extremes: solitude, or deep connections. Last year, I spent too little time at those ends and too much time in the dull middle zone of being near other people but not paying much attention or interacting in a meaningful way. I let myself go on autopilot and fall into old patterns and roles that I don’t like. I want to pay more attention: be nicer, but also be aware of what I want and keep relationships going that way.
What’s holding you back
At this point, the two main things that are holding me back are (lack of) money, and my own doubts. The money situation will get a lot better when the old house sells and the windows are paid off, both of which I expect to happen this spring. Beyond that, I still need to get income flowing if I’m going to make it on my own.
As for my own doubts, they seem really silly when I get explicit about them. “I’m afraid I’m not cool enough to be a successful internet tycoon and virtual vagabond”–seriously, that’s about what it boils down to. But if you look at the people who have made it, most of them come right out and say, “I’m just a regular guy. There’s nothing special about me that made this work. You can do it, too.” And if you look at what makes them so fascinating, charismatic, and mesmerizing, well, it might be that they were always this way, but at the very least, breaking out of the ordinary, following their passions, taking charge of their own lives, and having adventures has enhanced their most attractive qualities. If I keep growing and learning and trying stuff, I too will become more confident and interesting. And if I make sure I enjoy and value what I’m doing, the outcome doesn’t matter that much, so I can stop worrying about “what if I’m doing it wrong? what if I’m doing the wrong thing first? what if this is all a big waste of time?” If you’re enjoying yourself, what you’re doing is automatically not a waste of time.
Goals/plans/dreams for 2011
- Finish and release the free ebook I wrote in November. I want it to be really good, and I want time to enjoy the design part, so I’m setting the release date for Feb. 9—my birthday.
- Take the summer off from my day job to work on writing and niche sites.
- Release a second ebook, for sale this time.
- Continue posting 2-3 times a week on the blog, and make them really good posts.
- Have more adventures: try hang gliding, autocross regularly, ???
- Meet awesome people, learn cool stuff, and get supercharged with energy and inspiration at the World Domination Summit in June.
- Earn enough income to support myself by the end of the summer so I don’t have to return to my job in the fall. This one will be a major reach, but so incredible if I can make it happen.
- Grow, grow, grow! View the unfamiliar as a chance to learn and expand rather than a threat. Try things. Enjoy the journey.