The Year of The Process

For the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about what I want my theme for 2024 to be. A theme should feel that it’s just the right thing. Looking back on the last few years’ themes, I was building up to the things I wanted to do with my life. With Foundation, I wanted to set a baseline of habits and systems for myself. With Intention, I determined my desires. When it comes to 2024, I believe the the best guidance I can hope for is “The Process.” With the process, I’m focusing on the execution. Doing the work or letting go of the goal. Working through my the items I need to complete. And finally, taking the time to fix the little speed bumps and annoyances in my day to day life.

Live the Lifestyle

This piece is the part I really wanted to pin down this year. I mentioned in the first post for intention that I have a bad habit of coming up with ideas but making little progress with them. As last year was coming to an end, I considered focusing on deadlines or specific milestones to reach throughout this year, but what all I really should be focusing on is the work that needs to be done. The small actions day after day that slowly build up to a completed work or project.

The bigger idea or goal sounds great, but if I’m not doing the work needed, what does it matter? I’ve been coming back to this piece of advice from author James Clear’s newsletter from a while back. He wrote:

“It doesn’t make sense to continue wanting something if you’re not willing to do what it takes to get it.

If you don’t want to live the lifestyle, then release yourself from the desire. To crave the result but not the process, is to guarantee disappointment.”

Living with too many ideas is overwhelming. What do I really want to do? Of those, what do I want to work on now? The best answer to those is the one for which I want to live the lifestyle.

There’s another piece of media that has me truly inspired to get back into the creative chair. It contains a similar piece of philosophy to the advice above. The manga series Beat & Motion follows an artist who is getting back into his passion of drawing after quitting as a child. He recognizes his need to put in extremely hard work and practice to simply keep up with those with greater talent.

The spark of his return is a chance encounter with a friend of a friend. After he mocks his friend’s passion, she berates him and kind of threatens to throw him into traffic. After the encounter, he decides to animate a music video for his favorite artist, who just so happens to be the very girl who chewed him out. The story is ongoing, but I’ve been enjoying the early chapters I’ve read so far. There’s a balance between the daily grind, practice and improvement alongside dreaming up the big ideas to motivate and provide guidance to the next goal.

There’s only a little over 20 chapters out now, so catching up is definitely on my to do list. Speaking of which…

Inbox Outbox

I, like many of us, have accumulated too much stuff. I don’t mean in the physical material sense, though that can use some work too, but mostly in a mental tracking sense. I have emails to review, books, comics and articles to read, chores to complete, games to play, movies and TV shows to watch, ad infinitum. All of these things slowly pile up in inboxes everywhere.

Inboxes are the places where we shove the things that “need to be processed.” Emails, folders, stacks of mail, shelves, even something like YouTube’s “Watch Later” feature. Those are all things that need to be handled later.

While I want to make progress on these lists and inboxes, I don’t want to have pressure to “get through these as soon as possible.” I feel it’s antithetical to my vision for “the process” which is both do and to enjoy the activity in question. I mentioned in the end of the Year of Intention post, Daryl Talks Games’s backlog spreadsheet. I’ve taken this and started to add the games, books, etc. that I want to enjoy. A warning Daryl gave viewers against using a system like this was setting a hard deadline of completing a backlog. I want to have this as a fun way to help me pick games I’ve wanted to play but for one reason or another haven’t gotten around to yet. So far, I’ve just taken my Steam Wishlist and what I already own and am already pushing 200 entries. This is before adding in games I’ve already played but want to take a more critical look at, especially those I played as a kid.

These systems aren’t bad in of themselves, they exist for a reason, but letting them get out of hand means there is an ever growing list of stuff. As that list grows, there’s an ever worsening choice paralysis of what to do at a given moment. Instead of just picking something and enjoying it, I have to try to pick the right thing.

My focus lately has just been doing whatever calls to me at that moment. I’m trying to avoid paths well traveled, but am not fighting it if that’s what I’m feeling at the time. Better to be enjoying myself than stressing about if I’m working on the right piece of entertainment.

Little Tweaks for Big Improvements

This last piece is the dark horse of what I came up with for the process, and I’m already seeing massive gains in my daily life. What I’m looking to do is focus on fixing an annoyance or problem as quickly as I can. Doing this in just the last few weeks has led to me solving several small annoyances that I’ve been dealing with for years.

Some of these have been quick one or two minute fixes like changing a setting on my computer to stop my mouse constantly waking my computer from sleep mode. Others have been “inbox” to-dos for years. For example, I broke a staple gun years ago and kept meaning to fix it. The other day I spent about an hour and a half working on it until it was fixed. It was probably the most rewarding feeling I’ve had in ages.

The spark for this one came while visiting my brother and his wife, I noticed this shelf in their kitchen. When I got home, I looked at this section of the kitchen counter. I’ve long hated that spot because it was just this awkward separate piece from the rest of the counter, and it just kind of gathered stuff.

I asked about the shelf, and it turned out to be called a baker’s rack. Later that day, I ordered one, and then set it up as soon as it arrived. I’m loving it now, and so is my roommate. It has shelves for all the things we frequently use that were once buried in cabinets or other rooms. With that huge quality of life improvement, I’ve been looking out for other areas that I run into these frustrations.

I could keep going with examples, but perhaps I’ll save what I’ve gotten done as the year progresses. Having an idea in mind for a future post might help my publish more than two posts this year!

Finding these little improvements is something I somewhat started a couple years ago with automation, and I hope to leverage what I learned from that experience to improve my life.