New Year's Resolutions
Three Things #51: January 15, 2023
I wrote throughout 2020, then took a few days off at the beginning of 2021 and didn’t begin writing again until a full year later. I took the first week of this year off, too, and I don’t intend to make the same mistake again! So, here we are, and here’s the first issue of Three Things of the new year. What better way to start the year than with some New Year’s resolutions?
At the end of every year, for at least the past seven years, I’ve found some quiet time to do a personal reflection. The exercise is broken into three parts: review (the things that happened the past year), reflect (on what those things mean, and on how the year went), and revise (propose some changes on the basis of that reflection, like setting resolutions). Once in a while that review slipped a few days into the new year, but I’ve always done it—and every time I review my previous reflections I’m surprised at the degree of depth and care with which I approached the exercise in previous years.
I have a confession to make. I still haven’t found the time to do last year’s reflection. I still very much intend to do it, but I’m currently buried under a mountain of other important work, much of it very time-sensitive. Actually, I used to do reflections not just yearly but also quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily (crazy, I know). Over the course of the past year, all of those fell off, too—partly because they didn’t all feel very effective, mainly due to lack of time. The annual review is all I have left, it’s very helpful, and I don’t want to lose that, too.
I have another confession. One of the things I use this space for is things I must otherwise do but just can’t find the time for. I write about things that I anyway need to reflect on. As I wrote last time, it’s actually really nice to have time blocked every single day for reflection, especially when the space is flexible enough that I can write about more or less anything important as I can here.
So, while I won’t be able to do a full, proper personal review here—hopefully I’ll get to that sometime this week—I can at least use this space to kickstart the process.
Thing #1: Consistency
Let’s start with the easy one first. I’ve written about my running here a few times. As I’ve grown older and taken on additional responsibilities, it’s become more and more important to me. The time I spend running is now quite literally the only time I get entirely to myself most weeks (and I’m someone who really needs alone time). In addition to the obvious benefits in terms of health and overall wellbeing, I find that there are enormous psychological benefits from running. It’s an opportunity to focus, to clear my mind, to think, and to meditate. I recognize its importance primarily in the breach: when I’m ill or on the road and I don’t run for a few days, I feel the strong negative impact on my emotional and psychological wellbeing. By contrast I can be having a terrible day, feeling awful both physically and psychologically, and go for a run, and truly feel like a new person on the other end. It’s that potent and reliable, and I’ve never found anything else that works quite as well.
In spite of all of these benefits, until very recently I never worked out daily. I usually aimed for six days a week, and was happy to settle with four or five. For some reason I felt that I needed at least one day to rest and recover. I never really took the time to question this assumption. Over the course of the past year a few things have changed.
Firstly, running has just become more important to my daily routine for the structural reasons I outlined above.
Second, I realized that thinking that I need time off means I’m actually thinking of running as something stress-inducing, when the reality is quite the opposite. There’s a powerful difference between thinking of something as a chore versus thinking of it instead as a fun, playful opportunity to do something you love.
Third, I met and had a conversation (while running!) with an older gentleman who clearly is as passionate about running as I am. He told me that he not only runs seven days a week; in fact, he runs twice a day, seven days a week, once in the morning and once in the evening, and has been doing so for decades. This sort of blew my mind. This is something else I never considered doing. But it’s the sort of thing you’d do if you thought of running as joyful rather than as a chore. (I hope to someday be in a place where I can run twice a day, every day. I’ll happily settle for once a day for now.)
I used to set weekly goals for myself: run X days or Y miles this week. I may do that again at some point if I’m doing more serious training. But the simpler commitment to run every single day—regardless of weather, regardless of how I feel—appeals strongly to me, and I’m surprised I’ve never tried it before. The hardest part, and the most important thing, is getting dressed and out the door for the run. The rest takes care of itself. Always. This is what yoga folks call “getting on the mat.” Just showing up is quite powerful. Just getting dressed and out the door in the morning in the middle of winter, day after day, is quite powerful.
So far, so good. I’ve run every day this year so far. I’ve run every day for months now, even while traveling, the only exception being when I was too ill. And my running is faster and stronger and steadier than ever before, and I enjoy it more than ever before. It’s hard to believe that you can keep getting better at, and learn to enjoy more, something you’ve done for thousands of hours, but take my word for it, you absolutely can.
Some things, you really should just do every day.
Thing #2: Focus
If there’s one thing I struggle with, it’s focus. And I suspect I’m not alone. Modern life makes it difficult to focus for at least two reasons.
Firstly, things today are just more complicated than they used to be. A householder today has a thousand things to worry about that people didn’t have to worry about—that didn’t even exist—a hundred years ago, things like credit card bills, insurance claims, liability insurance, employee benefits and payroll, retirement accounts, licenses and vesting schedules and power of attorney and probate. Oh, and taxes, taxes, and taxes. Each of these things, on the face of it, is basically a good thing. Each is a technology and each has made modern society that much more modern. But, taken together, they represent an astounding cognitive and temporal burden.
These things are complicated. Someone has to manage them. If you don’t have a lot of money or many assets, you probably don’t need to pay much attention to them, and I envy you. If you’re wealthy, you can probably afford to find and hire someone you trust to manage them for you. If you’re middle class, you just have to do it yourself. I sincerely hope your life isn’t as full of these things as mine has been the past few years. I wouldn’t wish that upon anyone.
Secondly, life today is more interrupt driven. This is naturally the product of modern technology. By default—if you make no particular effort to the contrary—you can expect to be interrupted literally every few seconds by some unimportant notification, be it a phone call, text message, news headline, advertisement, or push notification from social media. It takes great know how and will power to combat these interruptions. I have no shortage of will and no shortage of technical know how, and yet I honestly feel like I’m in constant battle with forces trying to distract me. It takes a very, very long time to configure notifications the way you want them across an array of devices: desktop, laptop, tablet, phones, watch, etc.. (And then you install a new app, or upgrade your OS, or buy a new device, and you’re back to square one.) It’s that much harder if, like me, you’re easily distracted and inherently have trouble focusing. Research shows that modern knowledge workers spent only 75 seconds on the average task—in 2012! That was down from a few years prior. Imagine how much worse it’s become since then.
I’ve never found a productivity system that worked well for me. Most are geared towards scheduling and delegating things, identifying a small number of high priority tasks to complete each day, and large blocks of uninterrupted focus time. I have trouble with all of these. In most cases I have no one to delegate tasks to: no one with the time or inclination, no one competent in the required skills, no one I trust, or simply no one at all. And, most days, I have a mountain of small tasks to get through, not one or two big things. Sorting and triaging these tasks is fiendishly complicated as they have varying degrees of complexity, time sensitivity, interdependency, and importance, and are related to a number of projects, personal and professional.
This is one reason I’ve never tried to hire an assistant. I’m absolutely certain I’d spend more time training the person and fixing their work than they’d save me. I don’t think I could even explain to someone how to book a trip for me, given how particular I am about travel, let alone do something more complicated. Maybe someday we’ll have AI agents smart enough to do work like this, but I doubt it’ll be anytime soon.
Uninterrupted focus time is also very difficult. Working from home makes this hard (although I don’t remember it being easier in a crowded office). Needing to do lots of small tasks rather than one or two big ones that I can really focus on also makes it hard. Working with a remote team in later timezones that relies on me to respond to messages without too much delay makes this hard. I’ve mostly gotten to the point where I can shut off all notifications—email, phone, Slack, all other chat apps, knocks on the door—and concentrate on work, distraction-free, when I need to. But every time I open the door to use the restroom, or have a snack, or grab something that I need, I get distracted again.
The one thing that seems to work well is pomodoro-style, focused one hour chunks. I get up to stretch my legs and use the restroom after an hour of focused work, check for important messages, then repeat. I can usually break my work down into one hour chunks. One of my goals this year is to be more disciplined about working for a full hour without distraction.
Focus feels like something to strive for but never quite achieve. I miss times past when I could get completely lost in a task, usually coding, and just shut off the world for hours. I wouldn’t talk to anyone else and the thought of eating or sleeping or using the toilet didn’t even cross my mind. I still get back to this once in a long while, but not as often as I used to. These days, the world doesn’t let me turn it off for very long.
Focus is about more than what you do, it’s also about your mental state: what you watch and read and listen to, whom you talk to, the thoughts and ideas you allow to permeate your mind. It sounds cliche, but the mind is really like a garden and you need to be careful which seeds you plant and water. I have work to do here, too. Another goal this year is to read less news in the moment and instead read more high-quality analysis. Also, less random articles and more good books.
There are a thousand other things I can do to improve my focus. Having a neater, less cluttered workspace would help. Being more disciplined would help. Traveling less would help. Ultimately, though, I think focus is a state of mind, and it’s a choice we make that’s only partly dependent upon our environment. The only real way to achieve focus is therefore intentionality.
Thing #3: Intentionality
Working out every day is hard. Focus is harder. Intentionality is the hardest of them all.
Intentionality is one of those resolutions that’s sort of permanently on the list. It’s very important, and it’s very difficult. I try hard to be intentional throughout the day, and I’ve been trying for years, but there’s a lot of room to improve. For that reason, this third thing is as much reflection as revision.
First of all, what do I mean by intentionality? I mean two things: that you do the things you mean to do, and that you mean to do the things you do. That sounds pretty simple and straightforward but it underlies a surprising degree of difficulty.
Why? The human mind loves autopilot mode. It’s a little uncomfortable to realize or admit, but in fact we’re in autopilot most of the time. This isn’t just true of mindless tasks like going for a walk or brushing your teeth. It’s true of tasks that require some focus, like having a conversation or driving a car. It can even be true of tasks that require a lot of care and focus, especially if you’ve done that task many times before. It’s true of simple tasks and complex tasks, safe tasks and dangerous tasks, comfortable tasks and uncomfortable tasks.
There’s a fundamental difference between doing something, and doing something with intentionality. There’s no perfect metaphor, but it’s a bit like the difference between an image that’s 2D black and white low-res vs. one that’s 3D full color high-res. When you act with intentionality you notice so much more. You appreciate the task more. Something done without intentionality feels like a chore, something to be over with as quickly and efficiently as possible so that you can move on to something better. Something done with intentionality feels like everything in that moment, like there’s nowhere else you’d rather be and nothing else you’d rather be doing.
How can we live with intentionality? I don’t think there’s any single, universal answer. Like mindfulness and awareness, it takes a lot of practice. It’s a muscle that must be strengthened through repetition. It’s possible to be deeply invested in any task, no matter how simple or repetitive. In fact, one of the best exercises to strengthen intentionality is to try doing something that you usually do mindlessly—brushing your teeth, doing the dishes—with a high degree of mindfulness and intentionality.
Something that works well for me is to periodically pause, reflect, and set my intention. In the morning, before I get out of bed, before I look at my phone or do anything else, I ask myself, Why am I getting out of bed this morning? It doesn’t take long. And it’s okay if the answer is totally dull and mundane, and if it’s the same most days—as long as it’s honest. Answers that resonate for me are, To make the world a better place. To help people. To increase happiness and wellbeing, and alleviate suffering. For my family. Periodically reminding myself of this is powerful. You could do it before each meal, or every time you stand up or sit down, or every time you begin a new task. You could do it when you find yourself waiting in line, or with a spare moment to kill. You could do it on the toilet! Frequency is less important than regularity.
As my intentionality has grown, I’ve found that tasks often fall into one of two categories. The first is tasks that are boring but necessary. These are things that I don’t necessarily feel a strong, direct sense of intentionality towards, but they serve a greater purpose towards which I do feel strong intentionality. For example, running an annoying errand or making an annoying phone call—if I’m doing it for my family. Imbuing even these boring tasks with a sense of intentionality is a fun and rewarding game.
The other category is things that I’m doing, or about to do, but I simply don’t have strong intentionality towards. A good example of this is accepting an invitation to attend an event when I have no particularly strong reason to go: I don’t particularly care to see the person who invited me, and I just accepted by default or without thinking, or because I had nothing else pressing. Another example is agreeing to help someone with something when doing so will hurt me or take me away from something more important. In these cases, the right thing to do is to change your mind, with intentionality. (I’m really bad at saying no. Intentionality helps.)
I intend to live this year with great intention, because that’s the best way to be the person I can be, and the person I need to be, for the people who matter most in my life. Life is short and we don’t have time to waste doing unimportant things in autopilot. Set an “intentionality quotient” goal for yourself: the percentage of tasks you do each day with intentionality, or the percent of time you’re acting with intentionality. This will probably be quite low in the beginning—I’m lucky to do two or three things each day with strong intent—but I pay attention to it and have a goal to raise it over time.
In my experience, intentionality goes a long way towards making life more livable, and more fun. What can you do today with intentionality? What impact might greater intentionality have on your life?