New Year here
We are wrapping up 2018 by taking a long weekend at a farm house AirB&B way up near the New York and Pennsylvania border in the National forest. It is very cold and very quiet . . . outside at least. Inside it is more than noisy with 11 of us yelling and laughing and talking and catching up. I keep trying to find a quieter corner to just sit and soak up the positive sounds, and manage the negative sounds. Both are normal parts of living and living well. All we have is this moment, no matter if the calendar we use tells us that the current year is ending and new year about to begin. Those are somewhat artificial beginnings and endings after all.
So instead of making resolutions of those changes that I think may be necessary or beneficial for the coming year/future, this year I have been comtemplating the past year and grading myself on the things I did successfully and which ones I somewhat failed at and trying to discern why these were less than successful. Were the goals too ambitious? Did they lack appropriate urgency? Were they foolish and thus fail to grasp my attention and energy and focus on a daily or regular basis? What moved me forward? What was holding me back? Or you can make this process more emotionally and activity focused by doing the following.
Tim Ferris refers to this process as PYR's or previous year's review. He suggests that you take 30-60 minutes and do these steps:
1. Grab a notepad and create two columns: POSITIVE and NEGATIVE.
2. Go through your calendar from the last year, looking at every week.
3. For each week, jot down on the pad any people or activities or commitments that triggered peak positive or negative emotions for that month. Put them in their respective columns.
4. Once you’ve gone through the past year, look at your notepad list and ask, “What 20% of each column produced the most reliable or powerful peaks?”
5. Based on the answers, take your “positive” leaders and schedule more of them in the new year. Get them on the calendar now! Book things with friends and prepay for activities/events/commitments that you know work. It’s not real until it’s in the calendar. That’s step one. Step two is to take your “negative” leaders, put “NOT-TO-DO LIST” at the top, and put them somewhere you can see them each morning for the first few weeks of 2019. These are the people and things you *know* make you miserable, so don’t put them on your calendar out of obligation, guilt, FOMO, or other nonsense.
