My year of butchered resolutions
And how to save yours.
According to the media, 2016 was a terrible year: wars, assassinations, killing sprees and the loss of some of the world’s most talented people. For me, however, this year marked a turning point in my life: I (finally!) left my old soul-crushing job for a more fulfilling career, with an awesome team.
In 2016, I also acheived some of the things that I always wanted to do: read more books, started studying a new language (three, actually) and learned a ton of new stuff, including a comprehensive intro into the amazing world of machine learning — and some of its basic (but very much useful) algorithms.
The problems
Last year, I didn’t have any resolutions, at least not in a meaningful way. My “to-do list” for the then-upcoming year was fuzzy, generic and, most of all, too optimistic. When your plan for the next 355 days is “to become a legend,” the only way to go is to miss — and by a legendary margin.
This time though, I’ll be doing things differently in hope for a better result; But how differently? To figure this out, I had to look back on last year’s mistakes.
I want it all, and I want it now!
My first sin was writing a long, very long, to-do list. Of course, that’s not a bad thing, per se. The mistake, however, was attempting to do it all, at the same time. And that time was now.
A big chunk of my self-assigned tasks was directed towards acquiring new skills through the infinit knowledge well that is the internet. Learning, as you know, is not an easy task; most of the time we struggle to wrap our heads around new paradigms.
It turns out that mere exposure to knowledge does not suffice to learn it. For this to happen, every input needs to be linked to what we’ve already learnt. Knowledge needs to be structured, otherwise it would vanish as fast as it appeared. Our brains are learning machines, not recording devices.
The problem with the learn-it-all-right-away approach, is that it results in fragmented, isolated islands of information. These volatile pieces, swallowed in chunks from here and there, had no structure what so ever.
Thus, to-dos were stricken through faster but learning was slower; courses needed to be retaken as their content didn’t stick for long enough.
Part of my BIG PLAN’16 thing were creating new stuff based on what I learned, and documenting the whole experience through regular blogging. Needless to say, nothing of that happened.
Planning
Planning for this mighty endeavor was minimal. All I did was firing up Google Calendar, setting up some goals … and voilà !
Here’s what my GC looks like right now…
You see, learning is like a drug: the more you get, the more you want. For acquiring new skills, that sounds like a good thing. Until it’s not. Being able to improve one’s self “just” by learning and the sheer amount of knowledge there is, freely accessible to anyone, is so exciting. It’s not hard to see how one can easily overdo it. And I did.
What was on my plate ? Quite a lot actually.
It all started with a simple list:
- reading a book while commuting to and fro work;
- learning Swedish, 10 minutes a day, via Duolingo;
- filling the rest of the idle time (waiting in line, walking, …) either consuming a piece from my +900-article long list on Pocket, or listening to a podcast.
This was mostly a success.
By the end of March, I was already in the middle of my second book and on top of a +60-day streak on Duolingo. By this time, I was even able to construct and understand basic, simple sentences in Swedish (Jag älskar diiiiigg!), which was awesome. I also was successful in filling the idle minutes here and there according to the aforementioned plan.
All was good, until greed kicked in and my brain, triggered by past success, started demanding more and more. And I obliged.
Now I was learning three languages (Swedish, Japanese and Hebrew), mastering Python to the last PEP, practicing Django and getting to know all things Machine Learning. I also wanted to be a CLI ninja, mastering bash and some of its most versatile utils, such as curl and ssh.
Or so I thought.
The simple plan that worked with the simple list became unfit to the task, yet was not upgraded.
Frustration
All that mess resulted in a lack (if not absence) of real, tangible results. I was spending a lot of time on a lot of stuff, yet nothing was happening. This, in turn, killed my enthusiasm for much of the projects I started. The snowball effect didn’t stop here: the lack of a coherent plan, made it even harder for me to develop new habits.
Nothing stuck with me save reading books and mechanically dismissing those Google Calendar reminders to “Learn Swedish,” or to “Master Machine Learning.”
What made things worse was my denial that my plans have been foiled. Wrecked into pieces.
The elixir
Despite all the failures of the passing year, or because of them, I probably had the most important lesson of all — the mother of all lessons, if you well: how not to plan my goals.
From what I said, it’s clear that the missing ingredient was a clear strategy, aka. planning with a mission. All I did was filling up empty slots from my calendar with random tasks—no purpose in mind.
What can I do? Well, I subdivided my goals into two categories: essentials and power-ups.
The first class deals with recurring tasks, without any final, clear destination: eating healthy food, reading books and articles, listening to podcasts, etc). The second one is home to all that can be measured in terms of “progress”, e.g.: learning a language, acquiring a new skill, and so on. The status of these tasks will be assessed regularly using assignments and a scoring system. Thus, time slots would be reallocated frequently in order to make things go as planned.
Time slots, this time, won’t be assigned randomly; there will be rules and the most important one is:
NO MORE THAN 2 POWER-UPS AT ANY GIVEN DAY.
The second most important rule is:
THE SUM OF TIME SLOTS IS UNDER 2 HOURS AT ANY GIVEN DAY.
(If the second rule seemed out of place, allow me this brief explanation: there is no point in improving one’s self if thus one can’t enjoy a better life shared with loved ones.)
Every task, be it an Essential or a Power-up, was assigned a frequency and a quota. Reading books is daily, 30 minutes per day; blogging is weekly, 1–2 articles per week; side projects are monthly, one each month — on a weekend. And so on.
The tools
For the time being there are no special tools in keeping up with the devised plan; Google Calendar, a to-do app (probably Swipe) and a time logging app (aTimeLogger) are what will help me accomplish this mission.
But if things went as planned, maybe I’ll build an app to help me keep up, as a side project.
Final thoughts
As with every plan, this is a best case scenario, with some back-ups and fall-backs in case something out of ordinary happened. But in today’s world, anything can happen.
So, let’s just hope for the best.
See you soon !
