Yearly theme week one: too much, too soon
I'm a week into my new plan for the year and I've found that, as always in my zeal to make improvements, I've overstepped.
I wrote about my attempt at a yearly theme about a week ago. The idea is to get back to basics and start working on feeling grounded, the point of which is to have a good base to start living my life more in the way I envision it.
The ideas are solid, but being the mercurial type I am I overloaded myself with precise review lists and how often to do them, lists of things to do, the tools I was going to use, etc. These things are essential to me as I noted in that post, it's the volume of all of it that's causing problems.
It's a thing that's played out over and over in the last two decades of my life. In the past I'd likely just abandon the whole thing as a failure and proceed to return to whatever I was doing before that I wasn't happy with because it was easier. This time though things feel a bit different.
I feel like I'm seeing this early in the process and understanding that overloading oneself is just about the polar opposite of being grounded. I am realizing that I have a pretty full set of commitments already and that trying to shoehorn lots of other stuff into that is just going to be an exercise in futility. Processes, lists of things to get done, etc. are all great but there are only so many hours left in an almost-full day. I'll have to tweak my expectations of myself and keep moving forward.
I'm still feeling good and I'm excited about going into week two with some tempered, and more realistic, expectations. I have some tweaks to make to all of the lists and things (one of which someone reading this and knows me may have noticed already) but I'm going to keep moving forward with the plan. I still think it's a good one.
Update: And as the way serendipity seems to always work I read the transcript of this fascinating conversation between Ezra Klein and Oliver Burkeman which touches on some of the stuff I've been feeling with this whole thing.