2014 Resolutions in Brief

It's my first day back in my cubicle after my lovely two-week holiday staycation, so lunchtime seemed a good time to write down a few thoughts about what I want to do in 2014:

1) Take better care of myself -- For too long I've been treating my body like an old truck, except that I actually treat my old truck better than I treat myself. It finally caught up with me in 2013, especially in the form of three bouts of bronchitis, one of which was severe enough to bring on a ten-day stretch of total silence due to laryngitis.

I could make all the resolutions in the world to do specific things, but I can't actually do any of them unless I start taking better care of myself and get myself into better shape.

2) Unsubscribe -- My personal e-mail has become a horrible junk pile of missives from an enormous variety of organizations. I realized recently that I'm deleting 50 or 100 e-mails a day without reading them just to try to get to the worthwhile stuff.  I've had enough.  I used to be pretty softhearted about e-mails from various political organizations or charities that I like, but no more. If I'm inclined to delete it more often than not, I'm just going to unsubscribe. I need to regain some control.

3) Be more focused at work -- For various reasons my job is the great enemy of focus. I swim in an every-flowing river of instant messaging, e-mails, and meetings. This year I'm going to try to do less skipping about from fire to fire, and more focusing on tasks to completion. I need to do a better job of focusing on the big picture. Focus, focus, focus.


And that's it.  You'll see there's no "write a novel" or "run for office" or, well ... anything too specific there. (Not even, "Finally write that photoblog post with the electric car exhibit from the Concours of America, which was way cool.")

It may or may not be obvious to the casual reader, but those three items are not unrelated. I ran myself into the ground last year. It's not a coincidence that my blogging dropped off hugely last year. I need to rebuild my health, my energy, and my focus in 2014 if I'm going to accomplish any of the million-and-one other things I'd like to do, and that needs to be job one.