Just One Resolution

I don’t usually do New Year’s Resolutions. They don’t tend to stick, according to the science. And they annoy me. I don’t like to do things everyone else is doing, especially not when everyone else is doing them.

But I gotta figure something out. I’m tired of spinning my wheels. So I prepped yesterday and started today, with just one resolution. Just one plan–every day, I will check my bullet journal. Every day. Once a day, if that’s all I manage, though twice a day would be better.

I really liked my bullet journal last time, but I got caught up in trying to make it pretty. I’m not a crafty person, and sometimes I’d get in a hurry and get sloppy, and then it looked bad, and I didn’t like it so I stopped…but then I realized how much benefit I was getting from it and I tried to go back, but I never managed to pick it back up consistently.

This time, though. This time will be different, because there’s just one thing I gotta do. I just have to check the bullet journal. Just look at it, that’s all. Like fellow TDPer Erin said–Face Everything And Rise.

Of course, if I’m doing that, just looking, just facing where I am, I’ll probably do some of the things I’m trying to track in my bullet journal, a bit more consistently. I’ll probably remember to weigh myself, to log most (hopefully all!) of my food, to spend a few minutes here and there taking care of stuff around the house. To check in on my budget goals, to do my Duolingo lessons, to complete my 750words.

I don’t have to do any of that for my resolution, though. I just have to check my bullet journal. To face what I’m doing and not doing, the choices I’m making. Keeping track of what I’m doing, looking for patterns and seeking ways to do better would be extra. Bonus productivity! I can always use more of that. Also, if it’s bonus, I get to celebrate it.

No, it’s not pretty. I’m almost deliberately going the other way this time. It doesn’t need to be pretty. It just needs to exist.

Oh, huh. Kind of like the first draft of a novel.

Speaking of, I am working on not-the-first draft of a novel. I have gone back to the first novel I ever wrote, which has been edited several times and cut from over 270,000 words to about 150,000 words which was then cut in half, because that’s probably what it should have been in the first place–two books.

I’m having a hard time with it. That’s probably not surprising to anyone else, as it is something I wrote over twenty years and about a hundred how-to-write books ago. But it’s surprising me. It was so awesome! How can it be hard to fix? Let me just look at this–oh. Yikes. Okay, what if I–well, no.

Change is hard, y’all.

Anyway. Happy New Year, friends. I hope you succeed at things that matter to you this year.