Tag: resolutions

Resolutions for 2019

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.


Projects in Progress

So the other day as I was browsing the Internet in typical fashion, when I came across an embedded YouTube video, which I watched. When I clicked play, I saw, for the first time in about six months, an advertisement. This prompted me to ponder about how having YouTube Red has played out over the past few months. After all, six months is long enough to have perspective, but not so long that one is liable to forget the experience of what came before.

I immensely enjoy having the ability to create playlists that I can download to my phone. I enjoy it more than I thought I would. There is a certain joy in having just the perfect soundtrack for an occasion. So I can have a video game stealth mission soundtrack for prowling the aisles at the supermarket and acquiring the targets from my list, a military training cadence for exercising, the Jeopardy theme for waiting in line, etcetera. Having the proper soundtrack for an activity elevates the experience of it in a way that is difficult to describe in the abstract.

The exclusive content, insofar as I have had occasion to peruse it, has not captured and held my attention. The quality is decent enough; the series are TV quality. But this isn’t necessarily a good thing in my book. I already have access to plenty of TV series; more than I could reasonably watch. I don’t particularly need more series to add to my watch list from YouTube, even if I enjoy the creators behind it.

There is a certain utility in not having to contend with advertisements. It is hard to quantify this aspect, particularly because I do not notice the absence of advertising. Certainly I see far less advertising in total than previously, but so long as I am still connected to television, radio, and so forth, advertising still has a notable presence in my life.

Of course, it’s fair to argue that advertisements in the context of YouTube videos are more impactful, because they are presented when one is actively seeking and watching something rather than merely playing in the background during a scheduled break in program (which in most cases I will try to fast-forward through), and because YouTube advertising is targeted. This plays into a larger theme which has come up repeatedly in my life, regarding the value of my time and attention, through which I have sought to reduce my exposure to advertising.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that although I haven’t grown completely comfortable with paying for YouTube Red, I also haven’t come to regret my purchase. This is about as decisive a conclusion I am likely to come to in the near future.

While I’m on the subject of follow up, I may as well append a couple of remarks about the new year’s resolutions I posted earlier this year. The first resolution, to switch to 24-hour time, is going more or less according to plan. Phone and iPad have both been set to 24-hour display, as has my clock radio. My smart watch doesn’t have an option for 24-hour time, at least not on the watch face I use to display my medical data (needless to say, this oughtn’t be messed with). Aside from that, I have been working studiously to try and adopt the system mentally as well, stopping short from trying to convert in my head.

But of course, that resolution was the easy one; the low-hanging fruit to motivate me to get started down the list. The other ones have been more of a mixed bag. Exercising is, of course, difficult in wintertime; nevertheless I have made some progress. I have not made any sort of progress on sorting out my excess clothing, but then again, I expected that this would take some time, and I’ve been preoccupied with other matters.

2018 Resolution #2

2018 Resolution #2: Remove unused clothes

At present, I have an overabundance of clothes. In my case I define overabundance as having reached a point at which some 65% of my clothes have not been worn in six months, and some 35% have not been worn in a year. On the one hand this statistic is slightly misleading, as most of that 35% are clothes have never been properly catalogued and entered into my organizational system in the first place, probably because they were given to me in a large bundle all at once, and I simply never got around to sorting them, because I never found myself wanting for anything from those particular bundles.

Other times it is because The clothes no longer quite fit me comfortably, or I have simply not had occasion to wear them, or that the clothes are not even mine, but merely reside under my jurisdiction because on the day that specific item needed to be stowed away, I had space where others did not. Consequently I have acquired several stacks of clothing and apparel in closets and against walls.

This problem is exacerbated by the nature of our household’s gift economy, which is such that clothes which survive to no longer fit me are given to by brother, who has much the same problem, as he has clothes coming in both from gifts, same as I do, and from me. So in order to clear the backlog in my room, there has to be room in my brother’s room, and so on.

This task does not represent a terribly large physical difficulty, nor a particularly prolonged period of execution that would necessitate a major time commitment. It does however represent a challenge of both logistics and cooperation, in that it requires several parties to work on the same page.

2018 Resolution #1

2018 Resolution #1: Standardize to 24-hour time

A year or so ago, one of my resolutions was to finally iron out the problem of writing dates. For context: I grew up in Australia, where the default is DD/MM/YY. But in the US, where I now live, the default is MM/DD/YY. Now if I had to pick one of the two, I would probably lean towards the former, since it seems slightly more logical, and more natural to me personally. But since everyone around me uses the latter, taking that avenue would only cause more confusion in my life, perhaps not for me, but certainly for those around me.

For a while I would switch between the two systems depending on what purpose I was writing the date for. Items such as school assignments would be dated in the American fashion, while things for my personal consumption would be done in the commonwealth manner. Until after several years I started going throug my own files of schoolwork, particularly artwork, and encountering dates such as 9/10. What does that mean, in the context of a pencil marking in the corner of a sketch, jotted down as an afterthought? Does it mean the tenth of September, or the ninth of October? Or was it completed during the month of September, 2010? Or perhaps it is merely the ninth piece of a series of ten? Or perhaps it received a score of 90% that I wanted to record for posterity.

I knew that the dualistic system was untenable, but I also knew that I would likely fail in the mental self-discipline necessary in forcing myself into either of the two competing standards; especially given that there remain certain contexts where it is necessary that I use each. I therefore decided to adopt a whole new system, based on ISO 8601.

Henceforth, where I was given the choice, I would record all dates in YYYY-MM-DD format. This would make it abundantly obvious that I was recording the date, and the format I was using. It was also different enough that I would not confuse it. Where compelled by outside forces, such as stringent academic standards for school assignments, I would continue to use the other formats, but there it would be clear which format I was using.

Despite skepticism from those around me, this system has worked out quite well, and so I am expanding the project to include having time displayed on my devices in 24-hour time.