River: New Year's Day 2023

[mdlbear]

As I said a year ago, it's time for my annual goal-setting wishful thinking post. I'm not optimistic. (N says I should force myself to be optimistic. See below.)

1. The new top goal is getting the Whidbey Island house sold. This one has sub-goals: 1. get the Stuff cleared out -- combination of estate sale, eBay, and junk-hauling; 2. landscaping -- the yard has been basically abandoned for three years; 3. repairs -- floors, garage door, garage roof, painting, power-washing; 4. putting it on the market -- that's the easy part. I've wasted the last year and a half that I could have been using for all this.
2. Finishing the EOL paperwork: find a lawyer (who hopefully can serve as an executor as well), and get the will and advanced directives done, as well as documenting my files (which I gave myself credit for at least starting last year). A lot of my life is on the computer, and I can't expect anyone to make sense of it without a roadmap.
3. Better time management. That mostly means controlling doomscrolling, blog-scrolling, rabbit-holing, and general reading. There has to be time for self-care, writing, and music.
4. Self-care, as usual. Including but not limited to exercise, walking, journaling, and music. And, at N's strong recommendation, being deliberately optimistic.
5. Writing. This includes a new verse in QV (see below), but also more introspective journaling (see above).
6. Music. Includes guitar, singing, remote and maybe even live filking, and recording at least one album: Amethyst Rose. (Which also requires a new verse for QV, so songwriting as well.) (Also, I'm signed up for a course in recording at North Seattle College this quarter.)
7. Get back in touch with some of the many people I've lost touch with.
8. Reorganize my to-do lists. N says that I should trim my list down to something I can see all at once, and pick off 1-3 items per day to work on. (That's based on some (perhaps questionable) assumptions, including the grownth rate of the list, the size distribution of the items, and a psychological version of the Axiom of Choice. This is starting to look a lot like another rabbit hole.)

Comments

[ellenmillion]

*Cheers you on!*

[mdlbear]

Thanks!

[spiffyvoxel]

I redid my to-do lists at the end of last year, to (finally) plan stuff out for the next twelve months, and force myself back into doing regular training/learning, decluttering and life management. I use the Reminders app for this — I tried other 'getting things done' apps over the years, but they either tried to gamify things or put in so many options and tools that I ended up procrastination over task management, a fatal trap. My rules now are 1. don't overthink what needs doing, 2. be specific about what needs doing (write it out, break it down into subtasks in a separate list if need be) and 3. spread out long-term tasks over a month or so and do a little piece each day. That way, I don't get overwhelmed, do what I can today then self-care.

Blog-scrolling, I still get that. I have to force myself to stick to my RSS feeds and resist the urge to read all the unread stuff in one go, and absolutely no refresh either automatic or manual.

[mdlbear]

Many of these look like ideas I can use. (Not the app -- I use emacs for that.)

[jenk]

*waves pompoms*

[xap]

If to-do lists work for you, have you looked into Bullet Journaling? Specifically, as originally designed, rather than as often seen in 'Trends'? My friend Noel references 'Minimalist Bullet Journal' and once I focused on that method have found it quite helpful for keeping my lists manageable without also dropping/losing things.

Regardless of what it is, I hope you can find methods for all of the above that are workable for you, and will be cheering for us both to have positive progress over the next bit :)

[mdlbear]

I've looked at Bullet Journaling a couple of times -- from what I've seen written about it (which I haven't gotten deep enough into to be able to recognize the variants you mention), it didn't look as though it would work for me. In any case the method appears to have been published in 2013, by which time I'd been keeping my to.do file in one form or another for seven years. The format has changed somewhat since 2006, but the basic idea of keeping it online has served me well.

I should take another look and see whether there are any ideas there that I can adopt. I wrote up my format in 2017 (see mdlbear | How to.do it) after someone described it as a sort of online bullet journal, in a comment on one of my weekly posts. I should update that, since I keep finding more ways to extract data from it.

E2A: I should also mention that the emphasis on 2-D graphics has always been a major stumbling block. I have a hard time thinking in pictures or interpreting unfamiliar icons -- that's one reason why I find a Mac hard to use.