When I was in the home stretch of finishing grad school, pregnant, and working on my dissertation, I did a seriously aggressive purge of various subscriptions. My time and attention was so important that I needed as few distractions as possible. I thought I'd written about it at the time, but I couldn't find any mention of it around winter 2012-13. Anyways, I decided I'd start the year with a subscription cleanse.
January's goal: Unsubscribe from at least 31 things. The idea was kind of to do at least one per day, but I had a chunk of travel and knew that would throw things off, so I went with a numeric target for the month. I kept a list and just made it to 32 things tonight. I will continue unsubscribing from things, but this was a good start to the year.
I'm planning to do monthly goals this year to give me focus (and to release myself from the urge to try to do too much at once).
February's goal: a simpler photo organization system for all my digital photos
By the end of the month, I want to have a clear system for how I manage images from my phone and separate digital camera, as well as all my older photos which are spread across two laptops and possibly an external drive.
Right now I've got some photos duplicated on my current laptop but am not entirely sure which ones they are, I have a few different file naming systems, and I've got at least two different cloud backup systems in play but they aren't both including all the images. It's a mess, and my life would be easier if it wasn't.
Other expectations for 2020:
I don't think I'll have as much work travel this year as I did last year, and I'm ok with that. I probably already did my biggest trip of the year earlier this month. It was great, but the kind of work I did for that really isn't what I should normally be doing, so I hope it's an outlier in that regard.
I think we'll do some fun family travel this year, but nothing all that long or expensive. We've got the beginnings of a plan for a big trip in 2021 that I'm excited about. This year we need to see some family and friends, and hopefully get Jon and Adele's passports in use somewhere. A couple of plans to combine work and family travel already fell through this year, so hopefully something will work out.
As usual, because for some reason for the last decade April is my busiest month of the year, I expect April to be very, very hectic.
I hope to build some closer friendships this year.
I don't expect huge changes. As far as we can tell, we're all in very stable places (home, careers, school), so more happiness is a matter of maximizing our already wonderful circumstances to make more room for what's fulfilling and leave behind what isn't.
There's so much to be done in this broken world. I'm sorry I can't do all the things. I'm just trying to do what good I can in my little corners, and I hope you are able to do good in yours.
