My 2024 New Year’s Resolution
January 1st, 2024
2024, wow. Feels a bit strange to type that. But it feels this way every new year, I guess. The river of life continues to flow.
I spent a bit of time yesterday thinking about what I want to accomplish this year. Everyone is talking about New Year’s Resolutions and the plans they have for the coming year. As I consider what I want to accomplish this year, I’m a bit overwhelmed.
I don’t know that there is one goal, or handful of goals, that I want to focus on for an entire year. Life is unpredictable. Situations change, people change, and I change. I’m apprehensive of tying myself to a single pursuit for such a long period of time. That approach lacks affordances for evolving priorities, new information, and unforeseen life events.
Trying to set a yearly goal feels like furniture shopping for an apartment that I haven’t yet visited. I could take some educated guesses and things would probably work out alright, but some items inevitably wouldn’t fit quite right.
Instead of trying to chart a 365-day course to a specific destination, I’m going to opt for simply moving in the right direction.
In a sea of productivity tools + frameworks, it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees. We get caught up in metrics, goals, KPIs, OKRs, and other measurements of business productivity that we continually apply to our personal lives. In pursuit of accomplishing a goal we set 6 months ago, we neglect the urgent priority that appeared out of the blue last week.
I think goals can be helpful, of course, but we must avoid a rigid adherence to arbitrary targets. As life changes, so should our actions and priorities.
In the words of my friend Sean, my New Year’s Resolution is simple: Do more of the things I know are healthy for me, and less of the things that I know are not.
It’s not a lack of knowledge that keeps us from becoming the people we want to be — the first step is often easy to recognize. So start, and let the rest of the path become clear.