New Year's

And so begins a new year. As I was watching the televised festivities last night, I began to wonder about the curious importance we humans place on time, and its unerring march. Personally, I have never put much into the holiday. As a child, it was mostly an excuse to stay up late, and time with family. This feeling hasn't changed. I enjoy watching the ball drop, and as the ball falls, I kiss my husband. I make resolutions, some of which I may actually keep. But beyond that, the holiday has never held any real significance for me.

School may be a part of that attitude. In my mind, the year starts in August. The upcoming return to school is part of the same school year, even if it is a new semester. My next semester also doesn't start for a few weeks yet, so its hard to feel like this is a significant beginning.

To be honest, I don't see the significance in celebrating a new year. Time is time. It marches along at the same pace regardless of how we try to parse it into manageable pieces. People talk about trying to make this year better than their last. But isn't that just a little unreasonable? There is always pressures, always strife in our lives. And should our goals to better ourselves really be so stringently based on a relatively arbitrary measure of time?

Sure, years are physically measurable as our sun whips this small little marble we call home around itself. But, the purpose of this is simply to change the seasons. And for most of us, we no longer hold the change of seasons in the same necessity. Most of us don't plant our food in the spring, or harvest in the fall, or work the fields in between. Winter is not something that must be as stringently prepared for as it was ages ago. Throw on snow tires, unpack the sweaters, and throw an emergency kit into the car.

And yet, this day so arbitrarily chosen still holds a special significance. Rather than focusing on continuously improving ourselves, we do it in these little spurts, energized through January, and maybe even February, but often our goals are long forgotten by the time spring rolls around.

Even I, perhaps out of habit, chart my goals for this upcoming year, with milestone checkpoints at the start of each month to keep me on track. Carefully thought out, I managed to separate things into chunks I think will are realistic. This tends to be the greatest stumbling block for resolutions, too many of us bite off more than we can chew. But it is curious to me why we wait for the new year to begin on these things. Why put it off? If you come up with an idea to better yourself and/or your circumstances, why not seize the moment and start on it right away? Would setting goals to be started on November 1 and culminating them by October 31 not hold the same significance?

Maybe I'm a little biased. My religion follows closely to the Celtic calender, and our New Year's Eve is Samhein (Halloween). So I'm accustomed to looking at things a little differently.

So here I am, following the same curious customs that I'm here wondering the purpose of. I have my goals for the year laid out. And I have strong, realistic goals that can be measured. None of this "I'm going to be more generous" or "I'm going to be a better person" bullshit. I find such goals to be beyond silly. They are so immeasurable, and so subjective as to be impossible to fulfill, or not fulfill, depending on how honest you are with yourself.

And so, let's embark on this silly segment of time we call a new year. May your goals, whatever they may be, and however silly they may be, be achieved, and may obstacles crumble before your path.

Happy New Year.

Motivation

Motivation is a tricky thing. So many of our goals that we set for ourselves are far-reaching, the kinds of things where success is a long ways off. Maybe it's weight loss, maybe it's getting published. Maybe it's smaller goals that we wonder if they are really worth the trouble.

So it's vitally important that, when approaching any kind of task, we examine the motivation behind our goals. Reminding ourselves that even the smaller goals have an important place. Keeping our eyes on that wonderful feeling of  satisfaction that comes with accomplishing something.

As I look at my plan for the next 10 days, I see a number of things that need to be done. Back to school clothes shopping and haircuts for the kids, the big pre-semester cleaning I do every semester, various ways of prepping for school and getting on top of that. All good things.

More good things is working on my writing and game designing. These are important to my professional development. The better my portfolio, the better internships, and later jobs, I can get for myself. More good things.

Then I also have quite a bit of WoW and other gaming goals. While I doubt I'll beat both Uncharted and ACII like I originally wanted, I'm trying to take a little time every day to slaughter Templars. While my WoW goals are more contingent on finishing prior to the release of Cataclysm (comeon Blizz, give me a date already!!!!!!!one!1eleven) I know that once school starts to get into full swing, my WoW time will dwindle to virtual nothingness. I'd rather try to meet as many of those goals prior to school starting, where I could spend the final countdown to the Cataclysm gearing and poking through some final things.

Obviously, as much as I prefer the reverse, the focus is on my other, "more important" goals. Trying to accomplish these around the everyday tasks of taking care of the kids, losing weight, and all the other day-to-day stuff that weighs us down and eat up our time.

That's why it's so important to know why you're doing these things. Keep it right in front of you. Write it down and tape it to your desk where you'll see it every minute. Knowing that you're dragging through rehashing last semester's stupid Assembly assignments so that way you don't have to do them during the semester when you're more pressed for time. Knowing that tediously porting the 2D RPG from crappy C++ to the super-shiny C# will give you better options to create your own game.

Keep your eyes on the prize. The prize will keep you motivated when the tedious intermediate steps drag you down. If nothing else, think of the satisfaction of completing a goal and being able to smugly tell everyone how awesome you are because of how much you can accomplish.

Well, I guess I better hop to it. After all, I have less time today with Dungeons to complete and Dragons to slay tonight.

The Importance of Planning

Here I am, a week and a half before school starts. I'm looking at what I wanted and needed to get done over my summer vacation, and exactly one word comes to mind.

FUCK.

I'm beyond behind on all this stuff. Why? Because I didn't plan. Sure, I had a nice little list where I could check off everything I accomplished, but that list kept growing, usually faster than I could knock things off. Now I'm finding myself stressed as the countdown timer to when I'm back in school (and all my free time goes out the window) quickly reaches Zero Hour.

A million and three things to do, and not nearly enough time to do them. But it's not too late. A re-evaluation of my goals, and a tight work schedule and I could get at least a good amount of stuff done. Carefully keeping on track, and not letting myself get distracted with arguments with idiots spouting the merits of pirating, or reading up on the vast amounts of amusing material on the internet is an important step.

But planning is a fickle thing. Don't plan enough, and you risk end up not accomplishing what you need to do. But, if you plan your time too tightly, you can cause a great deal of stress when things don't go according to plan. Something takes longer than planned, an unexpected errand comes up. Even fun can become stressful as you worry if the impromptu movie with the family is going to royally screw you.

It's a matter of finding balance. What can you reasonably accomplish in a day? What can you allot a little extra time to to create a buffer if something goes awry?

It's a fine line, and I know very few who have been able to master this skill. But, if you can, things will fall into place a lot more quickly and easily, reducing stress and giving you the life you want to live.