New Year - same me. Everyone has a different opinion on Resolutions and aiming to be a better person/spouse/parent/etc. It’s admirable to have that mindset.
I’m far from alone in taking the stance that I am not a resolutions-person. I both don’t wait until the new years to start thinking about resolutions and I don’t wait until the new years to start doing them. I do it all the time - continuously.
That %1 better each day holds no bounds on what we can achieve if we continue to compound it.
Where do we go from here?
To the moon of course - and then beyond. But for real I believe we can all honestly take a step back - reflect on another year of growth and begin to extract threads worth pulling on to be better people.
Something I love reading about is productivity. I never want to be the person to measure it - and the mantra of “what gets measured, gets managed” has long been debated (as it should be). But there are things that I want to measure for the sake of my own internal development.
Maybe it is less the act of measuring and more the act of recording current state for the purpose of future reflection. If we keep appending new entries to records - then at some point we have a dataset that can be reviewed from a more wholistic perspective.
Recording
Take for example this blog. Each time I write a post about some random topic - I’m casting a vote towards the record books about where my mind was at the time. Streaming ideas out into the unknown for an unknown benefit (if any at all).
The act of recording is an explicit task of capturing data that may be valuable in future review/reflection. Maybe it’s noise - or maybe it isn’t. Nonetheless these records are threads of ideas for which I want to continuously improve. Maybe that improvement is something that is clear entry-after-entry or more of a slower process over longer periods of time.
I don’t measure these items in order to manage them - rather I start with ideas that I believe will result in achieving my %1 each day and start casting a vote for how to eventually-improve or continuously-improve.
Record Keeping
This part gets tough - it’s difficult to get a single-pane of glass for all-the-things that you want to track. I imagine the best tool for each job is the best way to stay consistent. Take for example my tracking of walking-and-working: I use sensors to track the data I find value and use platforms like Strava to do my record-keeping.
GitHub manages my development efforts to some degree and I can derive insights from the activity over time.
Continuously Improve
There are threads that I have been picking-away at for some time and others within reach that I want to explore more as the ideas solidify. I’m not making a resolution to be better because it’s the new year - rather I demand of myself the discipline to continually reach for systems that make we more proficient in many different domains.
Continuous has to start somewhere
Why not today?
I believe breaking bad habits and creating new good habits can be a great overarching goal here. Sometimes that is daunting and so I’d rather frame the act as that of recording current state and reflecting more about where you want to be / the person you want to be and being able to adapt as you learn more.
What kinds of things do you want to improve upon continuously?