So it’s January 1st 2019. And I find myself thinking all of the thoughts that most people probably have on January 1st every year. It’s a new year! A fresh start! A nice opportunity to clean the slate and start over!
But I am a little older now. I have some experience under my belt. I know for a fact that I’ve definitely been doing this every year for over a decade, probably since I was about 15.
In fact, let’s take a moment to review past January 1st word vomits, if there are any.
Jan 1, 2013 – 0021 – I set out to do two word vomits a day, hoping to finish 600 word vomits by the end of the year. This seeemed “somewhat reasonable and manageable”.
2014 – looks like I didn’t publish a word vomit in January here. Maybe I have a blogpost or a Facebook status update or something?
Jan 10, 2015 – “fuck it just do it” – I was feeling stressed and overwhelmed at work, because of my own poor project management. I wrote that my problem was my inability to write minimum requirements. I wondered why I don’t respect my sleep. Mostly, the post was just me getting all rah-rah about how I needed to Just Do It. (Also, kinda depressingly – it seems like I had stopped smoking at the time – I would start again later at some point.)
Jan 1 2016 – pt1, pt 2 – so this is cool! I did two vomits on the same day on Jan 1st 2016. Part one was goal-setting – that I wanted to write every single day, think more clearly, spend less time being distracted, have more of a daily system… I was articulating all of the things. Some of it looks flimsy and dodgy on retrospect, but it was likely progress over whatever I had before. Part 2 was about mindset – about having a ‘word-in-progress’ mindset, and about wanting to seek responsibility. I don’t think I was entirely persuaded of the idea yet, but I can see the beginnings of the riff. “I’m going to have to be a lot more strong-minded about prioritizing things.” This is an eternal mood 😂
Jan 1 2017 – hello 2017 – this is pretty close to something that I would’ve written now if I weren’t doing this lookback review instead. Meditate more, exercise more, schedule dates with my wife, make time for friends, house parties or unparties (wow, I’ve been talking about this for 2 years and I still haven’t really done anything).
There’s nothing for 2018. I did not do any word vomits between September 2017 and March 2018 – I was working on my novel in November 2017.
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So… now here we are, back on track with the word vomits, back in the game. I’ve been spending lots of time on Twitter, and honestly I’ve been starting to get a little bored of it lately. I think I’ve been spending too much time in bite-sized-thought land, and it’s time to start exploring thousand-word blocks of text again.
A part of me is thinking “it would probably do me good to go through all of the above links and put together something that’s a sort of coherent/combination new year post” – maybe this could be it, but I think it should probably be another post altogether, while I use this one to think this year’s thoughts (and have that be something I can continue updating each year if necessary).
I think the major thing missing, when I look back, is periodic review. Which is of course something I periodically talk about in this word vomit project, but not something I actively, actually do very often. In 2017’s Jan1 post, I said I should do weekly reviews. But what did I do, really?
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I came to write this vomit because I was thinking about games and project management. Specifically, I had the thought that I’m using in the title – “each day a project, each day a game”. What does that mean? Well, literally! Each day is a project to manage. Each day is a game to play. How am I playing today so far? Well, I barely got any sleep, so I’m going to have to go back to bed after this. That’s not great. But I’m about to publish a word vomit on day 1 of the year, and that’s pretty great. You see how this is playing out?
So… I guess the question I should be asking and answering is, how are things going to be different? Wait, I answered that already – it’s about doing reviews. Daily reviews, weekly reviews. Let’s start with the single day. Let’s start with today, and then review the whole thing again tomorrow. I have a work call in a couple of days. My brain is starting to get fragmented and dither-y from lack of sleep.
Can we finish strong? What is a day’s project? The project of having a good day. It means … sometimes it means doing a lot of one thing, sometimes it means doing a little bit of a few different things. You won’t know which is or was the right thing to do except when contextualized against other days. you need the context to know what was the right thing to do.
so… what I need is to get better at threading my hours, threading my days. fragmentation is not the problem. the challenge is to make sure everything is connected, and everything hooks up. on retrospect my regret should’ve been my failure to connect everything.
connect the projects, connect the games. see that the big picture is made up of little pictures.
The point is to keep returning. The point is to keep touching everything, keep threading everything, keep contextualizing, keep updating. Lots of small little revisits and returns. Starting again quicker and quicker. That’s what needs to be different.