With 2008 rolling in at midnight, a number of people are talking about resolutions for the new year. Some are sharing their own resolutions. Some are offering the advice to make very few resolutions because no one ever keeps them anyway, or they’re suggesting that resolutions by ignored all together.
I actually gave up on resolutions a couple of years ago because I was getting frustrated at not meeting them. Somehow, in the discussion that took place in my head, the resolutions were replaced with goals. It was no longer a case of, “I resolve to (some unfeasible feat).” It became, “This year, I’d like to (task), and this is how I’m going to do it.”
My goals for the new year became a to-do list, and I found myself more capable of doing what I wanted (except for when the program I was using to keep track of my to-do lists was no longer available to me because I migrated to a different OS before I discovered the joy that is Todoist).
So…don’t make resolutions for 2008. Really think about where you’d like to be a year from now, and then set those goals, break them into smaller steps, and make them part of your to-do list (or a similar motivation tool). See how far you get!
Happy New Year’s!
author: Jim Butcher
name: Rebecca
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2002
rating: 3
read at: 2007/12/01
date added: 12/30/07
shelves: borrowed, fantasy
review:
I haven’t been a fan of faeries since I started reading Irish mythology, so I guess it comes as no surprise that I wasn’t terribly enthused about a book that centered around a war between the Faerie Courts.
I did love Dresden’s battle cry as he was headed into that war, though.
author: Frances Wall
name: Rebecca
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2007/12/01
date added: 2007/12/25
shelves: manga
review:
I can now see why the anime went where it did after these two seasons.
I also adore Kaiba even more now (if that’s even possible). Too bad Takahashi-sensei couldn’t bring certain other characters to that level of “well thought out”.
author: Jim Butcher
name: Rebecca
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2005
rating: 3
read at: 2007/12/01
date added: 12/23/07
shelves: borrowed, fantasy
review:
This one wasn’t my cup of tea. It felt like it repeated itself ad nauseum in places, and that got tiresome quickly. Explanations also didn’t feel completed at any point in the story.
With it being the ever-fun, ever-crazy holiday season, I’ve decided to reduce a small bit of the demands on my time by putting this little cluster of websites on hiatus through the holidays.
Please go forth and have a wonderful holiday, regardless of what you celebrate. Take time to be with the people you care about and to reach out to those you can’t be with.
Happy holidays! See you in January!
author: Matthew E. May
name: Rebecca
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2007/12/01
date added: 2007/12/21
shelves: borrowed, business, creativity
review:
I’m a pretty strong problem solver and creative thinker in my own right, and I came away with a number of good ideas from this book. I especially liked comparing the lifecycle of an idea to the Scientific Method. I’ve known from my own work that there’s a definite process to ideas, but I really hadn’t thought about how that process worked.
I think anybody would benefit from reading this book.
I realize this is going to sound a bit crazy, but the next time you find yourself stumped in your writing, grab the nearest dictionary, open it to a random page, pick a random word, and work it into your writing. (Yes, this has worked amazingly well for some of my students, especially lately.)
You’ll more than likely be left with something you need to edit out of your writing, but at least you’re writing, and potentially learning a new word in the process.
Goal-setting can be a daunting task. It’s easy to set small goals because you can see where they’re taking you.
Long-term goals, especially ones changing a part or three of your life, are a bit harder to see because you don’t actually know what the end of the rod is going to look like. You can make your best guess, and try to visualize it from your current knowledge, but even that can be a bit taxing.
Lately, a number of people have been talking about writing these goals into a screenplay rather than a to-do list. Screenplays, by their very nature, are visual creatures. They are scripts to be followed, and reworked when a scene isn’t working.
It’s a great visualization tool because it really forces you to think about the story, or the flow, of your life, and then allows you to find your path through the flow scene by scene, act by act. You can measure the actions of the character (yourself) against a character bio that you’ve hopefully drawn up.
If you’re a visual person, give this method a try and see if it helps you move forward more than other methods. You might find it fun and productive.
(In case anyone wonders, I’m laying the groundwork for my “screenplay”, which is more a television show than a movie because an episodic structure fits my life much better at the moment.)
I’ve read a number of blog posts recently written by people who are feeling the strain of information overload. They’re talking about the freedom that’s come with dropping feeds out of their aggregator.
I feel a bit guilty, but I kind of laugh at that. We each decide what blog feeds we’re going to subscribe to, what newsletters we’re going to invite into our inboxes. We also have the ability to disinvite both at any time.
Personally, every couple of months, I like to throw a bunch of feeds I think I’m not reading or that I’m not getting anything new or useful from into a folder that I mark as “read” at the beginning of every time I sit down with my aggregator. If I find myself missing a blog, I look in the folder. (It hasn’t happened that often.) At the end of the month, I delete every feed in the folder.
So far, I’ve rid myself of nearly 100 feeds I wasn’t reading, keeping only one that I wasn’t quite done with yet. I don’t feel like I’m missing anything because in many cases, the blogs either covered a topic I was no longer following or the good posts are referenced by far smarter bloggers than me (and I happen to follow those far smarter bloggers).
The nice thing about the way the internet currently works is that we can control what information comes to us when. It’s a series of personal choices, and we have to do what we can to keep it relevant and useful to us.
