Per tradition, here are the three main items I’ve settled on as my publicly-declared 2019 New Year’s Resolutions.
1. Get a Haircut
Some variation of this has made its way onto my list for the past four years or so, even if I haven’t always included it when I publish my goals. This is partly tongue in cheek- a little joke to remind myself that it’s not life or death if not everything goes to plan. But aside from the fact that I do, in fact, need a haircut in the near future, putting some low-hanging fruit on my list helps remind me that I’m serious about getting these things done. There is also an important theme of self-care here. It’s funny, because you’d think for the inordinate amount of time, thought, and energy I put into my health and keeping me alive, that I’d be better at making sure I shave, brush my teeth, and avoid sitting in the same place and staring at a screen until my eyes burn. But actually, no, I’m pretty bad at that stuff, because next to the things I need to do to stay alive, everything else seems like a very distant second. So I need to remind myself from time to time that there’s more to being healthy than just the things that keep me alive.
2. Find a regular activity, or set of activities
It turns out, having very little experience with actually having free time, I often find myself at a loss when there’s nothin bearing down on me. Consequently, I need to find a better thing to do than just pace around like an idle villager in age of empires when my work is completed. I haven’t decided what exactly that will shape out to be. I have no shortages of projects that I put on pause when I started classes, but I don’t know whether any of them are suited to my purpose. I’d also like to draw up some notion of how much time is an appropriate amount of time to spend on video games, because while I think playing games is a good way to kick back and pass time, without any sort of yardstick, I find myself playing perhaps more than I would think wise if I were actually planning my time. This sounds like a separate resolution, but it’s actually the same thing- I want to come up with a set of activities and a balance that lets me have multiple vectors of outputs without pouring everything I’ve got on a given day into one particular item.
3. Stop procrastinating on correspondence
This has been a vice of mine since basically the first time I got an email. I have a tendency to postpone responding to things, often without a good reason, until the deadline for whatever it was passes. I know I’m sabotaging myself, and I don’t enjoy procrastinating, because some part of me is still agonizing about the thing. What makes this habit slightly more difficult to kick is the fact that there are genuinely circumstances when it’s better that I postpone responding to things. When I’m sick, for instance, I often don’t respond rationally or properly to people, and I’ve gotten myself in trouble this way more than once. So I need to find a balance between jumping the gun and shooting myself in the foot. I’ve gotten better at this, but not good enough yet.
