Monthly Archives: December 2009

Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of what I call “avoidance activities.” To name a few:

• Playing The Sims, which is the ultimate example because it allows me to substitute the mundane activities of a virtual life for the mundane activities of my actual life.
• Rating movies on Flickchart, which pits two movies head-to-head and asks you to choose the better one; I have noticed that once you reach a certain number of movies — for me, it was 600 or so — it only shows the same movies over and over, which makes a pointless exercise even more pointless.
• Updating and rearranging my themed reading lists on Lists of Bests, an activity I find endlessly engaging, but I could be spending that time doing some actual reading, don’t you know.

I call these “avoidance activities” because they suck away hours of my day, hours when I could have been doing something productive or interesting or working toward one of my goals. Instead, I’m avoiding doing anything at all meaningful with these time wasters.

This year, I want to focus instead on purposeful activities. Some examples:

• Spend some meaningful time on my friend’s social network IAM Learning Community, setting goals and getting support from the great network there; this is a great network of people all working toward a similar vision using similar tools and a resource that I am not taking advantage of.
• Blog more. Blogging is a sure-fire way to jump-start my writing engine. I also want to write more meaty blog posts, rather than just tossed off lists of links. My goal is to blog my way to a writing project idea.
• Remember how to do things just for the pleasure of it. Like writing, especially, but also reading, cooking, gardening — all those things that enrich my life.
• Spend more time with friends. I made space to spend one-on-one time with many of my friends over the holidays, and each visit left me feeling more energized and happier. I want more, please.
• Come up with more interesting activities for my son. This will be easier once the weather starts to warm (I truly hate the cold and going out in it), but we are already signed up for a dance class and I am starting a neighborhood playgroup. I also want to reinstate our Saturday family excursions.

In short, I want to waste less of my time and focus more on living my life. It’s not really about accomplishing anything specific so much as about engaging in the process.

I guess you could call this a resolutions post. I don’t like to make resolutions; I prefer to set goals. These are my goals for 2010.

And one prediction: 2010 will be the beginning of a much more positive and affirming decade. The Zero Decade is over, and even though it was a great time in my life, for the world it wasn’t so hot. Time to move forward!