My Resolve

Last year, I decided to have a different resolution for each month. That lasted through April. While overall it was a fail, what I accomplished in those four months made a big difference to me. Last March’s resolution of writing a blog post a day took a huge weight off my shoulders.  Maybe it’s simply a matter of redefining success.

I have decided that 2013 will be a year of action. Every single day, I want to accomplish something. Whether it’s big or small, something has to get done. It’s very much tied in to the idea of mindfulness. I don’t want to mentally wake up and have it be June already and feel like I haven’t done anything.

Being a fan of Dan Miller (of 48 Days to the Work You Love fame)’s podcast, he often tells the story of a dog whining while laying on a porch because he’s laying on a nail. While it hurts him, it doesn’t hurt him enough to make him move. Getting to that fed up point, even with small irritants, can make a huge difference. So far I’ve been good with my goal. It feels great to get some of the things done.

Well, I’ve gotten up and moved away from a couple nails already. One of the biggest ones was changing my personal email. On some level, I’d been wanting to do it for a while. But … I’d had my old email forever, I’d have to transfer my address book, I didn’t like the format of the solutions, I’m lazy, and a million other reasons why. Then I finally got the “mad as hell” phase. My email provider started truncating my messages to just the first line. At first it was a very rare occasion. Then it became every fourth message. THEN it happened on a VERY important email. AND then it happened again. That was when I was officially done.

Although my old provider didn’t allow me to export my address book (well, technically it did, but it wasn’t in a format that was acceptable to my new provider), it did give me a perfect opportunity to clean out the emails of people I didn’t recognize, people who had passed away, and those email addresses that I knew were no longer valid. It felt good just to have that housekeeping chore done.

Even better than that was the result of sending out my notification to friends about my new account. I heard from people I hadn’t had contact with in years. I had a chance to catch up that I wouldn’t have had without going through this process. I was also able to schedule in-person time with some of these friends.

How are you doing with your resolutions so far? or When was the last time you got fed up enough to get off your own proverbial nail?