Hey all. It's a new year. You know what that means, right? A month of writing the wrong date on all forms and check you fill out. At least this one's easy to fix; turning a 2 into a 3 is much easier than a 3 into a 4.
What else does a new year mean? Getting back to work, and making a bunch of new year's resolutions, for most people. I don't head back to work (school) until the 14th, but that doesn't mean I'm not - and haven't been working. So what have I been up to?
I've been filling out college applications. They're a royal pain. I don't enjoy doing them one bit. Hopefully, once they're done, they're done. I'll tell you more about them in another post.
Which brings me to a large point of this post. I'm making a few new year's resolutions myself. And making them publicly; I hope that the public-ness will make me more inclined to keep them.
1. No more Reddit. Reddit, for those who don't know (and I'm telling you so you don't go look it up and get caught yourself) is a time waster site, with loads and loads of funny pictures, gifs, and so on. There's other parts to it; there's news, interviews with famous people, etc. But I was addicted to the funny section. And going through all of the new posts was sucking up hours of my time. Every day. Well, that's going to change. I've sworn it off. And to make sure I stay off, I've hopped over to my admin account, and set the system settings to not allow connection to that website. At all. I do know how to change it back, but it would take about 15 minutes of work, and hopefully by that time, I'll have thought better of the urge, and will just leave it. I'll go ahead and admit it, I've already thought, strongly, about going back a few times. But I've found it much easier to resist, and I'm hoping it'll get even easier over time. Side note: If any other site comes along and starts taking up that much time - time wasted - then I know how to block it, too, and will do my best to be on my guard and do so.
2. Clear out my todo list. Like I talked about earlier, I simply let my todo list grow and grow this year during school, and then didn't have time once school was out to get everything on it done. I'm not going to allow myself to do that this year. I'm going to set aside time every week, typically on the weekend, to work purely on knocking things off that list and making it shrink. That doesn't mean I want the list to go away; on the contrary, I'm always looking for new things that I need to do or want to do that I can put on there. But I don't feel justified in doing that when there's so much already on there, nor do I feel like I have a reason to, if they'll just sit there and not get done. I also don't want the lower priority things - the things that I purely want to do - to interfere with the higher priority things - the ones that need doing - but I still want to do them. So I'm going to dedicate time to clearing out and working on the list. Every week, minimum.
3. To get things done every week, I'm making myself a much more strict schedule, and putting it somewhere I can hold myself accountable to it. Every week, maybe every day if proves necessary. This one's pretty self-explanatory. Even with Reddit gone, I still waste a lot of time. That's going to stop, and the best way for me to stop it, that I see, is to have a schedule where I'm busy all the time, and have things that need doing. I'll never get bored, which is often when I go waste time. I'll always have something else to do; if I finish something else early, I can move the rest of the schedule back, or allow more time for a bigger project later.
4. Do some things regularly. This list may grow as time goes on, but there's a few things I want to do that are going to involve a regular time commitment. The first is this blog. I'm going to write something and put it here every week. Period. This place is going to become much more active, even if nobody ever reads the darn thing. It'll have a lot more posts. I'm also going to finish my book this year. I don't know when, and I don't know how long it's going to be. But I'm finishing it. I'm dedicating myself to writing a minimum of 250 words every day, new words to increase my word-count and move the story along. I expect this to take 15-30 minutes of each day. I don't know what I'll do when I finish the book. I have enough ideas to start another one, easily, but I might want to make a revision pass or two through this one before I do that, to see what I can learn and how good I can make this one. Another thing on my list every day is to earn a minimum of 1000 grains of rice over at Freerice. I tried to do this last year, and ended up with about 260,000 grains of rice for the year. Not bad, but I know I can do better. If I really dedicate myself, I can get those done in under 10 minutes. And finally, I'm going to set aside 15-30 minutes (and no more, unless I have an urgent project) to typesetting my music that I have. I'll probably only finish like 3-4 pieces over the semester (Look for another post soon on what I accomplished with this over the break), but I'll always be making progress. And I won't be spending very much time on something that probably won't have that big of a return for me. But that's another topic, what to do with the music. Also, I reserve the right to add things to this list as they occur.
That's it for my resolutions for this year. What are yours?
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