I don’t make New Year’s resolutions for one very specific reason. A year is too long. I do really well for the first couple days, maybe even a few weeks, but then life pushes those ideas and thoughts to the back of my mind and I forget. I forget that I wanted to write so much or do these projects or lose this weight. Because life is full of other little things.
I moved on to monthly goals for awhile. Those kind of worked, except it usually went something like this:
- Write the monthly goals post at the beginning of the month.
- Immediately do the easy thing (I always included one easy thing).
- Forget about the list for 3 weeks.
- Go to write the monthly goals post for the next month and quickly try to do the rest of the things on it.
So that didn’t work too well either. I moved to weekly goals, and I think I’ve finally found my sweet spot. A week is short enough. I can remember things for that amount of time, or they can live in my new planner, or on my marker board, a reminder to get crossed off, but not there for so long that I don’t even see them anymore.
So you might wonder why someone who forgets things after a week would choose a word for the year. For the entire year. That’s like asking for failure, right? And perhaps it is, although I hope it isn’t. I tried this once before, and it kind of fizzled out.
The difference is that this time I actually took the time to break it down.
I chose the word Relationships this year. I feel like I’ve let a lot of my relationships take a back burner, and I’d like to fix that. I went with specific categories of people, and then wrote down some specific ways I could improve my relationship with each one.
- God
- Jesse
- My kids, both generally as a parent, and each child specifically
- My extended family – parents, grandma, siblings and their families
- My friends
- My church family
- My kids’ relationships with important people in their lives
Once I separated those categories out, I thought of specific ways to work on building and improving each of those relationships. Things like writing to my grandma once a month, or having the kids send pictures and notes to their godparents. Things like actually calling people (I’m an introvert who hates phone calls, so I put them off, but I do actually love talking to family and friends).
[…] On relationships: “By definition, to be efficient is to achieve maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense. But relationships don’t flourish or grow that way. Relationships need time, spent lavishly. Homeschooling is all about relationships, and relationships just aren’t efficient.” This is such a struggle for me, relationships vs. productivity, and it’s something I’m really focusing on this year. […]