Yearly Theme 2019

Happy New Year!

            It’s almost the New Year! I hope you all had a great Christmas and holiday season, but now it’s time for New Year’s Resolutions. But there’s a well-known problem with New Year’s Resolutions: most people don’t finish them. Even the habits that I’ve tried to start in the middle of the year or at the beginning of a new school year most often do not pan out the way I would hope. This blog is still going strong though! So let’s look at a suggestion by CGP Grey* the educational youtuber. He’s someone who doesn’t like to do work and so he has developed a lot of schemes to trick his brain into doing work and even more importantly doing it efficiently.

No Resolutions, Just Themes

            So what does CGP Grey do for the New Year? Instead of New Year’s resolutions he does Yearly Themes. If you want to hear more, CGP Grey goes much more in depth on this in his podcast Cortex, which he does with Myke Hurley. For example, CGP Grey has had the “Year of Less” and the “Year of Order” in which he worked on doing personally less work that didn’t advance his business and where he worked on creating a more stable schedule respectively.

Goals for the Theme

Now in a theme you can have several goals that help contribute to your overall theme for the year, but those goals, unlike the theme, must be specific, measurable, achievable (not too crazy like you’re not going to become an Olympic athlete if you hate running) realistic and timely (SMART) (1). So replace, “I’m going to write more” with a SMART goal, such as I am going to write for 25 minutes each day. The benefit of these types of goals is that you can easily see when you achieve the goal, but it also is quickly apparent when you fail to achieve the goal.

My Theme

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been attempting to come up with my yearly theme, but none of them seem to work for me. The Cortex subreddit had a thread where listeners talked about their yearly themes, which included things like Completion, Professionalism, and Order, but those didn’t fit with what’s coming up for me. However, after a lot of the idea ruminating in the back of my mind I’m down to two options: the Year of Adulting and the Year of the “Real World”. I’m leaning towards the Year of the “Real World” because if I survive this upcoming year without feeling like I’m dying every day then all those people who tried to scare me will be wrong.

Why this Theme

They say when you graduate high school you’re entering the “real world,” but then when you’re in college they say you’re still not in the “real world.” In fact, human development academics have developed a new term. You’re not an adult when you’re 18; you’re an emerging adult. But here I am 21 graduated from college and ready to toss my little bit of income from substitute teaching to fend off the piranha loans. But I have faith I can do it with God’s help.

What About You?

            You can do it too! What do you think of yearly themes? What would your yearly theme be for this year? What SMART goals will help you get there?

Notes:

*Not getting paid for this.

Sources:

(1) “SMART criteria” on Wikipedia.com 

Image Credit: "Happy New Year" by Irene Steeves