Despite this not being my first blog post of the year, I have not forgotten about New Year’s Hopes. As a reminder, New Year’s Hopes are like Resolutions, except with less of the false sense of confidence. Before diving into this year’s, let’s review last year’s hopes.
Old 2015 Hopes
1. Get more sleep.
Technically, this went well. Julie and I managed to adjust our sleep schedule back about a half-hour to get from 7 hours of sleep to 7 1/2 hours of sleep. Unfortunately, I think that 7 1/2 hours of sleep is still not enough. I think it’s telling that I thought that a good goal for 2016 would be to get more sleep and had totally forgotten that it was a 2015 goal.
As such, this goes in as an unofficial 2016 hope to get more sleep, where more sleep is defined as 8 hours. To get there, I think I need to start getting ready for bed at 10PM and have lights out at 11PM. One suggestion I read somewhere was to do a mini turndown service to start the shutdown process. Maybe I will try that.
2. Spend my time better.
Reflecting on this goal, I have no idea if I was successful with this or not. Unfortunately, it seems very difficult to quantify, but again, I had come to a similar type of goal for 2016 without remembering that I had done this one. That probably means that I did not satisfy this goal. Unlike the previous goal, however, I will not repeat it because i don’t know how I would know if I had accomplished it.
3. Put together a digital family tree.
Surprisingly, this mostly happened. The main obstacle was putting together the application to store all of the data, and I actually managed to do that. The trick now is just to get the data in, and assuming I built it well, that shouldn’t be too tricky. I will have to make an Asana task for myself to do that, but I am ready.
New 2016 Hopes
1. Watch more TV.
It’s an unusual goal, and I admittedly am being sensational with the title. My real goal here is to watch less twitch.tv. I had initially started watching gaming streams to follow professional StarCraft, but I have been falling out of the eSports scene, and twitch just became a distraction while in-between more significant events and a procrastination tool. Since I am mainly interested in the games rather than the community aspect of twitch, I just wasn’t getting much value out of it.
On the flip side, I am notoriously bad at watching TV and have taken far too long to watch too little. There are many reasons, but I think a primary one is that I feel that the right way to watch is to dedicate time to fully watch episodes without multi-tasking. Realistically, I just can’t watch all of the TV I want to in that fashion, and there is a lot of TV I am probably willing to watch while distracted. Examples include Reboot, Archer, and Star Trek: Enterprise.
So my hope is to watch less twitch and watch more TV.
2. Sunset some of my commitments and projects.
I (egotistically) think I am pretty good about following through on a lot of tasks and commitments. I have multiple active side projects (as listed on my website) and partake in many hobbies (often with friends). Most people tend to seek advice about how to complete projects, but I tend to have more issues figuring out how to finish up with ongoing responsibilities and move on when they have become more of a burden than benefit to myself.
I think the issue goes down to a core belief that the best things in life like friendships or skills should be permanent, lifelong commitments. As noble as that sounds, however, some things are meant to be fleeting through different stages of life. I think I need to be more realistic when things aren’t working out and not feeling guilty about letting down those who might be impacted.
All of this is, of course, coming from the guy who just picked up the tuba again after about 8 years and is trying to revive his blog. To do those things, however, I need to make time, so I hope I can deliver on this goal.
3. Express gratitude on a daily basis.
I don’t have a reference at the moment, but according to science, one happiness-creating habit is showing gratitude regularly. The most common method is to write down a few things you are grateful for every night before going to sleep, but I think that expressing gratitude to someone else or keeping it in mind through regular life all broadly fall into the category. Regardless of the efficacy, it just seems like a good idea for being more conscientious and maintaining perspective in my life, especially given how lucky I have been.
This is a minor digression, but having not grown up in a religious household, my family never said grace before meals. As such, the practice never meant much to me before, but in the lens of this hope, saying grace seems like a great way of regularly expressing gratitude. I hope to be able to do something similar, if without the religious connotations.