I’ve taken some inspiration from the Best Year Yet program, which I discovered on the Analog GTD Yahoo Group. They push focus over breadth. This is in line with a new insight I’ve had about the importance of creating, having, and printing One Page. One Page makes you reflect, select, summarize, save, and see your goals, all at once, as a whole. One Page leverages both conscious and unconscious powers of focus and intention.
One Page is the result of my evolution in resolution setting, which I will tell you for background & amusement. {But you can cut to How it’s done below if you like.}
the false “Magic” of resolution setting
As a ‘kid’ (meaning up through the end of college) I would make a long list of what I misleadingly called “new years resolutions.” Like many have experienced, the outcomes were disappointing and guilt-provoking. I guess an optimistic interpretation is that I was treating the turn of a calendar year into an opportunity to think about and enumerate my values & ideals & loosely defined goals. I would make them pretty, with colored markers, and ALWAYS had to finish writing & sharing them before the clock struck midnight. Otherwise it wasn’t ‘official’ and the magic of the clean slate of the new year wouldn’t work.
Who am I to feel guilty about resoluzzionni?
Some time around the end of college* however, I got it; feeling bad about myself for ANYTHING is not only unproductive, but arrogant, loathsome and wasteful. This realization was probably sparked by my semester abroad in Florence, where I (like millions of other American students abroad before me) realized that if America has a culture, Guilt is certainly at its core, and that life is about so much more than achieving a lot. Paradoxically, I realized that I am so small, but that life is so grand that I should not – and cannot – even pretend to understand all of it, and that trying to conquer it by achieving some stupid shallow ambitious goal is just hubris. Who am I to torture my poor little body mind and soul in order to achieve something that society thinks is important but that nobody will even notice I did in 100 years? If my life is but a grain of sand in a big bleu sea, then who am I to ruin it with self-flagellating inward focused ambition – am I really so important? Does what I do really matter?
Ultimately, I discovered in a cobble stone piazza drinking from a ‘honest little bottle’ of [cheap] red wine, a life well-lived is one where I live and die happy, and help the other grains of sand I bump into along the way to do the same. The more honorable resolution is to live life to the fullest. (At the time I was also reading Ishmael and becoming paralyzed by an obsession with altogether eliminating my impact on the planet in every way possible, by living a non-consumerist lifestyle of nature and leisure. Everything I do matters + nothing I do matters = maddening intrapsychic conflict!)
One year, one focus.
Thus began my habit of setting one focus (a nonspecific striving more than an absolute resolution) per year. I picked the thing I thought would have most positive impact on my life….. for example, do one thing at a time (this one started working! I kept it for two years) and rest when I’m tired. The things I’d focus upon at the new year tended to be behavioral response patterns I recognized as being core to me (habits, things I kept doing, to my own demise) but that I wanted to change. Since most behavioral response patterns are immediate & automatic, they are hard to remember to change (such as biting nails – a thing I’ve never done but I’ve heard it’s pretty much unconscious). Thus, having only one of them helps you to remember to remember it.
That said, I’ve had a hard time setting stakes in the ground about other goals I want to achieve, and after living so long with life almost scripting appropriately challenging & admirable goals for me (e.g. get into UCLA, maximize my fun & social life at UCLA, get out of debt, learn about relationships, don’t become an office drone, get into grad school, etc…) I realized I hadn’t set one for myself in a LONG time, if ever. Now I guess I’m a grown up, with the span of life so overwhelming I have to start reining it in with goals. But how to avoid the Magic of new years mistakes of the past?
how One Page works
This year, I was going to set my annual focus as being punctual & unhurried. But this is SO opposite of how I have lived my whole life that I was almost intimidated out of it, even though I know it will produce improvements in my whole life. So I started thinking about breaking down punctuality into certain life areas, and taking on a new one each month after conquering the last the month before.
Then by happenstance I came across the Best Year Yet idea and have skimmed a few pages & adapted my own plan accordingly, this time focused on the paper product, which I am coming around to admitting has much more importance than we credit it.
One Page works by creating just One Page summarizing what I want to become in 2007. As Best Year Yet recommends, I will select just 10 goals to write on this page & a few guiding principles. One year, One Page. Then each month I will review my goals & my progress towards them, and select a set of activities that will help me get closer to (not necessarily ‘achieve’!) each of my goals, with the least amount of effort. One month, One Page. Then plan each week in order to reach the monthly goals. One week, One Page.
why One Page?
Using just One Page forces you to select the goals and associated actions that will have the highest payoff, without allowing you to go overboard with enthusiastic but unrealistic, winter-break-induced foolhardy denial about what can actually be accomplished day to day. It forces you instead to think about what you could become in a year, if you set yourself to it, one printed page at a time.
this plan leverages both Intentional & Unconscious energies.
Apply your conscious intention to the selection of those few precious, high payoff goals. Engage your unconscious awareness in solving your problems & recognizing opportunities to get closer to your goal by posting your One Page in lots of places – at home in the bathroom, by your bed, pasted on the front of your moleskine, as your computer’s desktop background, as a screensaver, by your desk, in your treo.
Revision — or — Perfection is the enemy of Good.
Don’t worry about your goals being permanent, but get them as good (simple, powerful, focused, essential) as you can in a reasonable amount of time, probably over three or four days, most of which will be spent thinking about them & taking loose notes as you commute, etc. Your most powerful goals are the most obvious, and the more you allow yourself to think ‘about’ them, the better your intimidated subconscious brain will be at figuring out how you talk you ‘out’ of them!
You are not setting in stone, but you are setting in paper (which to an edit-happy evaluation-avoiding writer, feels scary enough!). It’s somewhat final. It’s final enough that it’s ‘done’ so that you can stop editing & revising your goals and get to doing them.
Of course, this page will get revised as new opportunities present themselves & your thinking matures…. but with regularity rather than commitment-phobic caprice. In the meantime, you publish, for yourself, and for anyone with whom you are willing to share.
To sum up
It’s about focus, it’s not about time. Focus, focus, focus. As I always say, don’t be a pussy. Make your choices and then print them out and live with them until your next scheduled review. A decision made in the right general direction will always trump indecision about which is the best direction. Apply your intention: reflect, select, summarize, save, and see your goals, all at once, as a whole, on One Page. Review & update every month, plan every week accordingly. The magic of the mind’s unconscious will help me do the rest.
I will check back in & let you know how it’s going… if you have reactions or experiences with something similar please comment & share! Happy new year!
