Planning my 2022

Warning, this is a life update blog with a little bit of house cleaning. If that doesn't interest you, you can turn away. I won't be offended.

People bemoan and make fun of new year's resolutions, but I embrace the feeling of "new year new me" and the energy that comes from starting a new chapter in my life. Even though most people fail to meet their resolutions, I always try to make them for two main reasons.

My thoughts process on this whole "new year's resolution" thing

Having a starting point allows you to start a fresh

Humans live in cycles, we are children, then teenagers, adults then elderly. Each cycle is made up of a start, and an end. we think in periods, days, months, years, decades, and every time one ends and another one begins it's like walking through a doorway into a new room Doorway Effect. Our psychology is to shed the old ways and think towards the future, just like at the end of the year we tend to look back on the year and reflect.

To me, I could resist this with all the pessimistic hipster energy of my generation, or I could attempt to hack into this obvious feature of human psychology. Now I obviously didn't invent new year's resolutions (or did I) but I am going all-in on red this year and seeing how it changes my habits and life.

Failure breeds success

I'm really good at failure. Early on in my career, the tech industry had a new buzz saying "Fail fast" and as a young nerd who loves catchphrases, I jumped on this like a Melbourne supporter on the 2021 AFL season. This has given me the aspirational tech perspective on new year's resolutions. All the articles about how quickly people dump their weight loss goals come February to me means that for at least one month a year people are conscious about their health. That's a whole month they are working, learning new skills, trying new things. That sounds pretty cool to me.

Ok get to the point. Aspirations

The framework I'm using and have used to work on all my habit building is from the book The Game Changer. Game Changer outlines the concept of finite and infinite goals.

Finite goals are things that can be achieved. They are quite literally "take out the rubbish tonight" (I forgot). Infinite goals, or as I like to call them - aspirations - are more of an ethos. They outline less tangible, achievable tasks and more fluid things. Like, what is important to me? What do I want to be, represent and protect? When I look at myself and hopefully when other people look at me do they see these things?

I have been developing this ethos for years now and I've settled on the most important things to me:

• Independent - I want to work towards being financially independent, not in a FIRE way but an "if my life goals change tomorrow" I'm not chained to my desk with golden handcuffs.
• Challenged - I've found life without challenge isn't worth living for me. So if I'm going to be working 40-50 hours a week on a career that needs to be something that works the ol' noggin.
• In Love ❤ - Relationships require work, and I find that I'm at my best when a part of my mind is always working to be the best partner I can be and keep that romance alive.
• Healthy - This is very new to me. When I was younger I took this for granted but now I'm in my 30's I need to be fit and active or I very quickly start to fall apart as my mental health dies with my physical health.
• Content - Finally I want to be content with my life. Where I am, where I'm going, and what I have done. I want to be able to look back on my life and say "yeah, I lived a good one" (if I die at all).

Over my life I expect these to change, and they should as I grow. But right now I think these are what truly represent how I want to be as a person.

The yearly word. Focus

I chose this word because 2020 and 2021 have been very unfocused years for me. I achieved a lot but it was through just sheer effort. I wasted a lot of energy, time and happiness to make those achievements. So I have chosen to focus on a few key parts of my life. Things that matter to me in 2022, things that I believe will bring me success, and things that will hopefully help me meet my aspirations.

Now you will see down below I put a % time on each of my yearly focal points. This does not translate into time, and shouldn't. I have a job. I work at least 40 hours a week that's 33% of my waking week, I can't do less work because my goals change (but what a world we would live in.) No this is about where I want to put my mental energy. 25% mental focus on work is fairly high as most things at a job require very little mental energy, I'm not putting "replying to emails" as one of my goals but it absolutely would need to be done as a part of my life.

My Focal points for 2022 will be:

• Chloe (Mah gurl).
• Freelancing.
• The Witch Game and my game development journey.
• My testing career, my professional presence, and my mentoring and leadership skills.
• My Weight and improving my relationship with food.
• Travelling like it's 2019 again.

All of these feed into one or more of the aspirations I stated above. Some of the planners among you will see the above and be like "those Goals aren't very S.M.A.R.T." :nerd_face:. Yep. At this level, it's more about understanding the direction of the ship. We get more granular and objective the closer we get to the present.

Next. Projects that matter

My next step is looking at the next quarter. This step is around grabbing those points of focus and creating projects that help me further those goals. This is where I need to start building outcomes, or as I think of it, "How do I know I succeeded?"

I won't go through all of them but to pick out a few:

• Get My Game Pillars Complete - By March I want to have the core pillars of my game completed so I can focus on styling and polishing over the next year.
• Monthly Food Challenge - Every month I want to try a new challenge around trying different ways to eat healthier. January's was no take out for a month (it's been rough).
• Interesting date nights once a month - As it says on the card. Every month we are going to do something intentionally interesting.

It's important not to over-plan because that would be wasteful. So from here, I'll break these down further with a narrower view and more granularity but that shit is boring so I'll spare you that.

The Final Result

This is what I finally ended up on, and I'm going to be honest... I'm pretty proud of the result. January is over which means there are 11 months left to focus and I plan to keep you all updated with my progress on these focuses and hopefully have given a few of you ideas. Also, this blog makes up the first of my monthly blogs... so. ✅. See you around fam.

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