New year ordinary to not ordinary

While everyone I know in the USA was hours away from the arrival of 2022, I was getting up in my first morning of the year. I bet some people I know in this part of the world may have been nursing sore heads, but I wasn’t (though perhaps not for lack of trying?). Instead, I was wiped out because I was up way too late the night before. I’d gotten into a video spiral, watching all sorts, one leading to another, as they do, until before I knew it—well, let’s just say it was extraordinarily late, even for me. In truth, though, apart from degree/scale, it was all pretty ordinary for me.

The first thing I encountered on New Year’s Day was a news alert that Betty White had died. Every morning, I pick up my iPad to check my emails, Facebook, etc., and I have certain news alerts set to show on the lock screen so I can get a sort of quick briefing. This wasn’t the first time that I saw, before anything else, an alert about the death of someone famous. Sometimes, when I’ve opened Facebook, I've found out that someone I knew personally had died. All that’s because of the timezone thing, which makes my life forever out of sync with the USA, and Europe, too, for that matter. This, too, was pretty ordinary.

The rest of the day, however, was definitely not ordinary: I was too tired to do much of anything, so I didn’t. I wasn’t clear enough in the head to write a blog post or record a podcast episode—though I thought about doing both. Instead, I just cleared out the temporary computer folders I use for the blog, made sure everything was backed-up, and then set up my folders for 2022. Not exciting, but still necessary—and it meant I felt I’d actually accomplished something that day, small though it was. Needing to accomplish something every day is also pretty ordinary for me.

My New Year’s is mainly about contemplating the non-ordinary: What do I want to DO in the newly-minted year? I begin thinking about that in December, and by my birthday, three weeks into the new year, I pretty much have my goals worked out, and some (possibly still vague) plans in place.

As I often say, I never make New Year’s Resolutions because I feel it sets us up to fail, and when that happens (probably inevitably), people often give up on all their resolutions. Seems kind of pointless to me.

Instead, I begin with some unformed ideas about what I’d like to do/accomplish in the New Year. Lose weight? Sure. Travel? That’d be nice—in New Zealand, though: Even if the borders do open up, I’m not going overseas this year. Too risky. And, of course, my biggest goal of the year is the same as it’s been for nearly two years: Get my house settled and organised, and, on from that, my life.

HOW, exactly, I do accomplish those things, including timelines and specific goals/steps? Those are things I haven’t worked out (that’s what the first three weeks of each year are about). This year, however, I’m planning on something very different and very much not ordinary for me: I’m going back to my olden days.

Thirty years ago, when I was a grassroots LGBT+ activist in Chicago, I was organised—I had to be because I had so much going on. Back in 2015, I wrote about how I organised my efforts back in the day. I said:

I’m at a point in my life that I need to become better organised, not because I’m as busy as I was more than two decades ago (I’m not), nor because I think being organised is some sort of virtue in itself (I’m undecided about that…). Instead, it’s because my memory has become bad enough that if I don’t write things down, I don’t have any hope of staying on target for various projects, even relatively small ones.

In the years since, much has changed, but the things I talked about in that post haven’t—especially the very thing that led me to look at reviving/adapting my old system, my bad memory. I constantly forget to do things, and that slows down many of my projects. For example, even when it was possible to do so, I kept forgetting to ring the movers to come and pick up the last load of moving boxes, and I also kept forgetting to order the bin for secure document destruction. But the bigger problem isn’t just that too many things slip my mind, or that projects take too long because of that, it’s that it takes a LOT of mental energy to try to remember things that I wouldn’t actually have to remember if I had a system to keep track of everything.

I found a way to stay on track with an important thing: Taking my daily my medication. Nearly a year ago, I wrote about using Apple’s “Reminders” App to remind me to take my medication, especially because at the time I had to take pills twice a day and sometimes simply forgot one. I still use that system (though now only once a day), and I also now use it to remind me to do something in particular on a particular day. If I set a deadline for the reminder, then alerts from the App stay on the lock screen of my phone until I deal with them. Very handy—but not as useful for managing projects, which usually have many steps, often with sub-tasks and varying deadlines.

I tried using Apps I already have to manage my household projects, but that failed. Basically, I listed tasks and sub-tasks—and then never looked at it again (that’s actually the same problem I was having with paper-based reminder notes, “to do” lists, and the like). I don’t know that there’s a practical (for me) solution to that problem, but it’s no excuse to avoid doing anything.

I decided that this year I’m going to give paper-based systems a fair trial. What will make it work this time when it never has before? No idea. In fact, it might fail yet again. Still, I’ve got to find a way to get my life back under control, and this feels like a part of the way I can do that. However, whether it succeeds or fails, I’ll document the process here on the blog. After all, in a sense what I’m talking about is just another project—“one project to rule them all”, comes to mind.

Despite touching on things I’ve tried or even used in the past, this is still new and uncharted territory for me—or, it may as well be. At the very least, whether it's all a success or failure, it’ll still give me things to blog about. Something ordinary from something not ordinary. Typical for me, really.