Priorities
Not doing resolutions this year, or maybe I am but in a way that makes it more vague. The year is six days old and I’m trying to figure out what my priorities are. The big looming thing in the middle of it is a move to Canada in August and all of the colossal life events - selling the flat, shipping the cats, finding a new school, possibly keeping my job?, starting from scratch with bank accounts, driving, credit rating, utilities, everything else - kind of puts “run 200km every month” in the shade (1).
There is, as ever, a ton of stuff I want to read or learn or watch or get better at, but with only a small window of time every day, it comes down to what do I prioritise the most? If I have 30 minutes of free time, what goes into it?
Top of the list, I’m going to put a real basic: reading. I want to read something every day. And not articles. Definitely not the news, more on that below. Ideally a nice paper book, but I have a Kindle and it’s very useful, and I just got all six Dune books for 99p each. In order to facilitate reading more, I’m going to take some actions to free up space for it: I’ve logged out of Twitter and intend to stay logged out. I’m planning to not use my phone browser (or, really my phone at all) for idly noodling around. The main source of idly noodling around being, as mentioned above, the news. I’m sick of the news. Opting out. I am signed up to some mailing lists where the main stories will come to me so I can see what the latest variant is or whether Ukraine or Taiwan gets invaded first, but endlessly skimming the Guardian homepage is wasting my life. I’m going to read books, is what I’m saying. This was a long paragraph for that short point. I got a stack of books at Christmas and I’ve made it through three of them already, and now I’m currently on volume three of Journey to the West. That will take a little longer.
Second on the list is Chinese. That’s dipped off a bit, since I’m exhausted to the point of death most of the time and it actually requires brainpower (sorry for the implication, books), but I think I should be able to get something in every day, either some flashcards, or translating children’s books, or having my daughter shame me by saying things like “why don’t you learn it faster?”.
Running is also a strong priority, but it doesn’t drop as easily into time that suddenly appears in front of me. I can’t exactly bash out 10k in the 45 minutes immediately following dinner, or stop halfway around the common to pick up the baby to see if he smells. So it will have to be a bit more scheduled, but “every lunchtime during the week” is working for me, and squeezing in what I can do at the weekends will have to do.
So that’s it, the main three. If I have enough breathing space to do a bit of those every day, I’ll call it a success. This leaves behind a large basket of secondary goals, so let’s throw out some of those.
Writing: Hey, I’m writing right now, sort of. I have a handful of short stories that have been in progress for literally years. Might even write a song again? Let’s not get too ambitious.
Tech: I do a lot of tech during the day, for money, but there’s the ever-expanding universe of new stuff and the fundamentals I’ve forgotten or never really learned in the first place. I’d like to do some React to keep my toe in Javascript, give Rust more of a spin.
Video games: Down the list, sadly, because I have so many but I can’t play the remastered Resident Evil 2 in front of my kids.
Music: I would love to play a song on a stage again, but I don’t even have calluses on my guitar fingers any more.
Sleep: Ha. It would be nice to sleep.
(1) I’m still probably going to try run 200km every month (2)
(2) Annoyed that markdown doesn’t support superscript