I had mentioned to a user here, @LarrySwinger, that my resolutions are a little more involved than just the unplugging on Sundays I wrote about in another post that was really about books.

Towards the end of December, I was starting to get a little hung up on what my New Year's resolution should be. One reason for this is that, while I had mostly not made New Year's Resolutions for most of my life, I did this year. I had figured it out pretty late, around Feb 1st last year. But it shaped my whole year. It was great.

However, knowing that there are other things I want to work on, and wanting to change it up, as well as understanding the significant difference one resolution can make compared to another when you are actually doing it, has left me pretty stressed about which one to choose. It's like picking the cups at the end of The Last Crusade. You may end up being an entirely different person for the rest of your life, depending on what you pick.

At this point, I'm willing to invest some time to really think about how to pick the best one. How do resolutions compare? Well, it sucked trying to think about it in the purely abstract, so I decided this would be easier if I wrote down at least a few, so I can run a practice selection on a small sample list. How would I compare three ideas vs all the possible ideas? Well, I ended up just going at that point. I was shocked by how many half-decent resolutions I was able to write with pretty little effort, with a few of them being gold if I can say so humbly.

Do you want to know how many? It was around 80 initially. Most are more thematic. And some are more specific. Here is a small sample. Some of these are meant to be odd little creeds to live by for a year, or a way to model your thinking around.

• I train the AI
• Teaching
• Timing
• Consistency
• See nature every day

Some of these are more personal than those few, so there is a bias in which ones I'm showing.

So then I realized what the real plan is. It is resolution(s)! I already have a really great way to rank things and pull something out of a ranking. It's what I use for my task management. So they are all going in. Then I will select a resolution for the week, month, year, and I eventually decided to add a quarter. And I'll just use my standard rank and pull practice with that software.

So far, I only have a week resolution pulled. It is the 'See nature every day' one. It's going to be a short week because the new year started in the middle of one. If I pull a resolution, I put it back in, in case I want to do it again or want to use it for one of the longer periods.

The other nice thing about this is I'll be able to trial a lot of resolutions on the week scale, and so I'll have a better idea of what is really worth doing on the month and quarter scale. And I'm delaying doing the longer scale ones right away. But I'll probably pull my month one pretty soon.

The other cool thing about this idea is I think it can inform on an even larger scale. Over the course of a year, I'll have gotten to try out more goals and more mindsets than most people get to test out over their whole life.

As the purpose of my resolution list has changed from its initial inception, from a trial list to practice comparing resolutions with, the standard for them has reduced a bit. If an idea sucks, it probably won't make it out of the ranking process, or I can try it for a week. With a bit lower standard for what makes the list, it is actually up to 150 ideas. Even with doing many resolutions over a year, most of these can't happen, so only the best will happen. So of the ones that have been added since then are things like.

• Learn some music
• Change my primary programming language
• Think like a DBA
• Learn new math

The other reason why I think this can be good is this idea will let me trial things that can actually be negatives. For example, someone could make a theme for their year to be "Write plans and execute them as I planned it," but another person could decide their theme is "Be more adaptive." Do you see how these are opposites? Which way is the better way to work? It may depend on what you need in your life. What is a positive motion depends on where you are. But IMO executing plans verbatim is not the highest way to work. But it sure can sound nice when you write it as a goal. So basically, the other nice thing about this plan is it avoids accidentally picking a landmine goal for an entire year when you don't know enough to know it's really not the best. At least you don't know until you've tried and seen how overemphasis on that mindset really does have drawbacks.

Ok. Now take bets on if I'll really do this.