“You’re right. We could sit around here all day, talking, passing resolutions, making clever speeches. It’s not going to shift one Roman soldier.” – Life of Brian
When I farmed sprouts I was assertive. I was an alfalfa male.
I have mentioned before that the whole New Year holiday has never resonated with me.
New Year’s Eve means amateur drunks on the roads, bad decisions, and an excess of early September births. One of the things that I thought about when I was a kid (not born in September!) was the idea of a resolution. I’ve always thought of a resolution as a promise not outwards, but inwards: a promise from today me to future me.
I tried it a few times when I was young. As I got older, I decided that resolutions didn’t make sense. I have now decided that Future Me is probably in a better place to make decisions than Current Me. I mean, Past Me in 2020 should have bought a lot of gold, as Current Me can now attest. So, promising Future Me something that Future Me might not even want isn’t the best idea.
I mean, twelve-year-old me wanted to join the Columbia® Record Club™. Twelve CDs for one cent! Now I realize that the Columbia™ Record Club© is a circle of hell somewhere between having to listen to Whoopi Goldberg for 20 minutes a day and having to smell Whoopi Goldberg for 20 minutes a day.
I lost my ABBA CD. Where did the disco?
I’ve since thought about changing Current Me into a better Future Me. I decided to do that instead.
So, I wrote down on a piece of paper, “Making 2026 The Best Year Ever”.
Nice header. Could I do it? Jury is still out, and I never judge a story until I see the end. I’m giving it a current “okay”.
I wrote down this stuff the second week in January, so I’m two weeks in. I was rather stunned on how making some small changes could translate into immediate and large results, making a whole year’s goal in a week. Guess I was aiming too low. Lots of times, my guess is that the biggest thing standing between me and a goal is me just doing it.
I’m not going to share entirely the things I’m doing, but one of the actions that I could take was:
Spend an hour a day doing something for Future Me.
This was absurdly successful on day one. It’s the art of anti-procrastination. Find something that would make life easier for Future Me. Spend an hour doing it, every day.
That’s it.
They used to call it Stalin.
I’m actually doing that right now. Normally I write these the night before I post them. Tonight, I’m writing this a day earlier than I normally write a post. Each minute I spend on the post is a minute I won’t have to spend tomorrow. The other bonus is it will give me time to review it and edit it and think about it.
This works well. Absurdly well.
Most of the other things have been based around organization. My den now looks much better, and when I walk into the room, it makes me happy to be there, rather than staring at a pile of papers I know I have to deal with on a messy desk.
Now, that stack is half as high and I know that with four or five more hours, my den will be my favorite place in the house.
Moore’s Law says that transistors double every two years on a chip. They do that by making them smaller, so less is Moore’s.
The part about devoting an hour to it is important. Most of the time my procrastination works on the idea of, “well, it will take me six hours to do that, so I’ll wait until I have six hours.”
That’s not good. It’s a thought that allows me to rationalize putting something off until tomorrow. But if I have to do it because I owe Future Me, it gets easier. I just go, start, and put in an hour, and be free to stop after that hour is done.
Wow. The results have been big. I think one of the big hurdles to overcoming procrastination is just doing the very smallest part of what I’m planning on doing. Tonight, it was: ”Okay, I’ll open Word®.” Opening Word© is easy. One second later, I’m staring at a blank page. I remember a video I wanted to reference for this post, and 30 seconds later that video is up in the adjacent window.
Boom. Ready to go.
Absurdly easy, yet now I’m two thirds of the way through the first draft of the post. That’s work that Future Me doesn’t need to do. It’s done. I’m actually not at all unhappy now, but tomorrow me will be absurdly happy that he was given this little gift of time. (I can verify this)
Is the past tense of William Shakespeare Wouldiwas Shookspeared?
That’s just one example. But to build the Future Me I wanted to build, I decided to see if there was a path. If there was a path, I’d break it down to the smallest possible step. Once I had that step, it actually solves another hurdle: the brain hates failure.
Or, at least mine does.
It would rather have a mediocre non-win than a chance to lose. So, I break the task up into smaller tasks that are impossible to fail at. Open Word®. Who can’t open Word™? This actually short-circuits the willpower part of life. If it’s easy to do, I’ll do it.
An example: if I think of shaving my face (I haven’t done that in years, but hang with me) I can think of it in two ways. First, I can think, “I have to shave my face. Every day. For the rest of my life.”
That’s soul-sucking. Awful. And you know you can never win because the hair keeps growing back. I know people who think like that. Ugh.
Or, I can say, “Shaving, two minutes in the shower, done.”
I try not to make things bigger than they are.
I also need to build out a mechanism to change that doesn’t require willpower, about which I believe Mr. Twain said, “lasts about two weeks, and is soluble in alcohol.”
What can I replace willpower with?
Willpower is easy. I’ve quit tobacco dozens of times.
Aversion. Yeah, it’s a negative emotion. So what? I’m actively avoiding something, and I need to visualize that person I don’t want to be, and then act in the opposite way that produces that person. It’s actually much easier than willpower, and the farther away from that person that I don’t want to be that I drift, the better.
I don’t have huge changes to make (though with a few, I’m expecting huge results) and I plan to revisit this every week, and see what the next steps need to be, or, if Future Me has gotten smarter and decided that there’s an even better way to go.
Okay, I cheated. I decided to make one New Year’s resolution for 2026. I decided to resolve to gain weight and exercise less. Perhaps I’ll fail at that one, too.
