The New Year’s Blur
Welcome to the week where you hardly know what day it is as we flail from Christmas to new year’s to holy-shit-it’s-2022 in a lovely, confusing blur of time that should be enjoyed to its fullest.
As we chatted about in last week’s newsletter, it can sometimes feel like a burden to do the whole new-year-new-me thing when we’re just trying to enjoy this down time. I mean, working on yourself is work. It’s exhausting. And unfortunately Santa did not grant my wish for a day off from consciousness, so I’m going to talk about my approach to new year’s resolutions today.
I’ve done this the past few years and found it to be both enjoyable and effective; a combo I find myself increasingly striving for these days.
If it’s not enjoyable, I probably won’t do it, and if it isn’t effective, I might just give up. So, aiming for enjoyable and effective helps a lot, wherever I can.
OK back to new year’s.
So around this time, I tend to find myself wanting to both reflect on the past year, while also setting a new aim for the coming year. Both of these are incorporated into this approach.
I like to call it the new year’s reflect + retain + refresh. It is largely inspired by Tim Ferriss’ year in review designed to replace traditional new year’s resolutions which completely discount anything you’ve actually done over the last twelve months. This strategy incorporates recent data on yourself while setting a new aim for your future self.
There are three key steps to this new year strategy:
1. Reflect
Step 1 involves reflecting on the activities and habits from the past year that added to your life, and the ones that took away from it. I find it helpful to make a T-chart with a (+) on one side for the energy “nourishers”, and a (-) on the other side for the energy “drainers”. Then, write out the habits that fill you with energy vs. the ones that drain you of energy.
This really helps you see visually what is serving you and what is not.
Nourishers: think creative activities like reading, walking, calling friends, meditating, working out, family time, etc.
Drainers: scrolling on your phone, staying up too late, making decisions based on other people’s opinions, etc.
Some prompts to get started:
(+)
What did you do this year that was great? What are you proud of? What habits did you create? What aspects of your routine did you most enjoy? What did you discover that made you feel good, happy, inspired?
(-)
What did you do that wasn’t great? What made you feel drained, exhausted, unmotivated? What aspects of your routine do you least enjoy or struggle with the most? Which activities zap the good emotions out of you?
Here’s a sample of my list from this year:
2. Retain
Now that you’ve written out what helped you this year and what hurt you, you can shift to the retention piece of the puzzle.
Some helpful prompts to consider:
What aspects of your routine do you want to maintain, do more of, or do less of? What was the most helpful/nourishing habit you consistently engaged in in 2021? What was the most draining/damaging habit you consistently engaged in in 2021? For this step, it’s easiest to make a 3-columned chart with titles: maintain, more of, less of.
This might seem repetitive but this is helpful in catalyzing your reflection process into action. It’s great to say this was/wasn’t helpful last year… but in making this second chart, we focus on what we can specifically do with that information.
Here’s a sample of mine from this year:
3. Refresh
This step speaks to the more traditional ‘new year’s resolution’ style of setting new goals that are additive to what you’ve done in the past year.
My problem with traditional new year’s resolutions is that it almost feels self-indulgent to say ‘here’s a list of everything i could do to make me the best version of myself’. By making this huge list with lots of vague self-improvement-y actions, it almost feels like we have done the work of improving already, when we haven’t done much at all. I know this is going to break some hearts (it certainly broke mine), but making lists does not equal making progress. Sad news, I know.
Doing the thing yields progress. And when we try to do too many things - especially too many new things all at once - well, that’s a sure way to stunt progress, or prevent it from starting at all.
So keep this list as bare bones as possible.
Keep it simple
Be skimpy on your resolutions. If you could only pick 1 thing to improve on this year, what would it be? What if you could pick 2 things? 3 things? Work upwards. You can also make a giant list and pare it down to your top priorities if that works better for you.
Just keep the final list smaller than you think you can actually accomplish, because building new habits is hard. Trying new things is hard. Evolving intentionally is fricken hard!
So let’s say you want to be more creative in the new year (holler). You’d love to start knitting, writing, doing pottery, take drawing lessons, sing, dance, and a million other things.
Start with one. Pick one little thing you can do. Do that well. Do it consistently, and then once it’s a locked in habit and you don’t need to put active mental energy into maintaining it, you can move on to something else.
This may seem novice or oversimplified, but it’s a really effective way to get on the right path without overloading yourself with too many goals too early when the whole thing still feels overwhelming and then nothing actually gets done.
Be Specific
Whatever you do pick, be as specific as possible.
For example, instead of “read more books in 2022”, you could say “read 1 book per month in 2022. In January: The Monk Who Sold His Ferarri, February: Atomic Habits, March…. etc.”
Being specific makes it easier to start, and leaves less thinking for your future self (read: less excuse-making for your future self). Try and make it as simple for yourself as possible. Have everything laid out in advance so all you have to do is begin, not ponder: what book should i read? what language should i learn? What new hobbie do I want to try? Leading you to.. ahh this is so hard, I don’t have time to sort this all out. I better save it till next year.
Prompts for Refresh:
What would you like to do more of in the new year? (think: habits that have been on your to do list for a while, activities you’ve been meaning to get to, events, trips, etc.) What new things do you want to bring into your life that you haven’t tried? What do you want to create in the new year? Make this list on a separate page. Be specific and sparing. Remember, this is all purely additive. It’s much harder to build in brand new habits/routines than modify existing ones like we did in step 2. Be picky!
It can be helpful to think of new habits like babies and established habits as toddlers. New habits, like babies, are super delicate and need your constant attention to survive. Established habits, like toddlers, still demand tons of attention but are slightly more independent and durable. Don’t take your eyes off your new habits! They need your full attention, badly.
Here’s a sample of my list this year. Note that a few of these were habits that I listed in my do “more of” column in the retain chart. Since I didn’t really have structures around them yet, I treated them as “new habits” even though I dabbled a little bit with them in 2021. By treating them as completely new habits, I can be ultra-specific and make them top priorities, ensuring they don’t slip away in the new year.
Following these few steps should help you distill a list of things you want to keep doing, do more of, do less of, or start doing in 2022.
After doing these three exercises, your brain should have a clearer picture of the ideal combination of what you’re doing now and what you wish you were doing for the coming year.
And that’s all new year’s is really about – taking a moment to pause, reflect, and reset.
And sure, there are lots of reasons to do this type of reflection on more than just new year’s. Heck, do it every quarter, every month if you want to. But there’s also something nice - something comforting and exciting - about everyone taking some time to slow down and work on themselves, in big ways, small ways, gentle ways, and strong ways, in the new year.
Whatever your new year’s resolutions are, just remember to take it easy and take it slow. Radical change does not happen overnight.
For a little bit of bonus material, I’ll mention one final thing that I love to do with my year’s hopes n’ dreams n’ plans:
Visualize them.
While it can sound woo-woo, it actually helps. Having a visual anchor for what you are trying to achieve helps your subconscious mull over it even when you’re not actively thinking about it. The easiest way to do this is to create some sort of visual aid to guide your subconscious.
The most common form of this is a vision board.
Once you have collected your list of things you want to retain and refresh in 2022, collect some visuals that bring these habits, events, or goals to life, visually, at the forefront of your mind. Maybe that’s seeing some physique that reminds you of your health goals, or a photo of a beautiful cake that reminds you to bake more, or a picture of a house because you want to buy a home this year, or pictures of your dream vacation to Greece, the new dog that you want, an alarm clock that displays the time you want to wake up every morning…
Whatever is top of mind for you, find a few visuals that get you excited about it, and make those the mental anchors you attach your goals to.
Your vision board can include words, phrases, ideas, pictures you’ve taken/found online, or anything else.
It’s yours. The most important part is to find photos and words that feel right to you - that make your mind hum in excitement and inspiration when you seen them.
Use those visuals to bring the things you want into reality.
New year’s can be a strange time. It can feel so existential and reflective and yet at the same time, it’s just another week out of 52 in the coming year. So, don’t worry if you don’t get to your new year’s resolutions by Jan 1st exactly, or if you miss a couple weeks of progress. There’s no bad time to do a reflection like this… new year’s is just a good ol’ kick in the butt reminding us to get it done.