Resolutions, in order of importance

Opinions on the format and value of New Year’s Resolutions vary widely. Some people prefer philosophical statements, some people prefer concrete and measurable goals, and some people think the whole idea should be loaded on a rocket and fired in to the sun.

I do a mix of the philosophic and specific, and I treat New Year’s as a chance to review my “life process”. I don’t expect any of this to work for you - I’m an odd bird - but maybe it’ll give you some ideas or inspiration.

Without further ado, my resolutions, reviewed and revised for 2020, in order of importance:

1. Go to bed

Stop stealing tomorrow’s joy by staying up too late and getting too little rest.

2. Meditate

Meditate each day, even if it’s only a few minutes of deep breathing. Without mindfulness, everything else becomes harder.

3. Exercise

Exercise helps with happiness, endurance, focus, and health.

4. Journal

Journal every day1. Express gratitude, celebrate accomplishments, and check in with myself.

5. Learn

Read. Make art. Try new things. Listen to smart people. Don’t do it with the mindset of “becoming great”, do it with the mindset of growing.

6. Don’t worry about things outside my control

Things outside my control have no intrinsic value. That includes things that happened in the past.

7. Pause

Make space between receiving external stimuli and flinging a response back in to the universe. Give your brain a chance to do its job.

1For journaling, I have a markdown template that looks like this:

JournalTemplate.md
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
## I am grateful for...

*
*
*

## The best things I did today are...

*
*
*

## What's on my mind is...

In my .zshrc file I have aliases for when I’m local (VS Code) or remote (vim). It copies the template to my journal folder and makes the file name the current date.

.zshrc
1
2
alias journal='cp -u ~/Documents/JournalTemplate.md ~/Documents/journal/`date +%F`.md && (vim ~/Documents/journal/`date +%F`.md)'
alias journalw='cp -u ~/Documents/JournalTemplate.md ~/Documents/journal/`date +%F`.md  && (code ~/Documents/journal/`date +%F`.md)'