The past few weeks and months have been incredibly chaotic for me. It blew right by between catching COVID, all of the work chaos, and the move out of my apartment. It's been very hard to determine what is integral to 2023. It's been rough, y'all, truly. However, I remembered an exercise that we did in grad school, and that helped me gain some clarity. Let me explain.

The Exercise

When I was in graduate school, we were talking about motivations for being in graduate school. We had an open discussion about what each of our motivations was, and she set the scene with what we can expect in the program.

We also touched on a few other points - like extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.

Towards the end of class, she handed out a half sheet of paper that had the following on it. She enlisted everyone in the class to fill it out at the same time while she gave us a minute or so for each question.

Of course, we obliged.

For the purposes of this quick demo - please humor me and do this before proceeding to the rest of the post.

1. Set a timer for 1 minute. You can use the one below if you want (while keeping this tab open).
2. Answer the following question.

Question 1 - (This is a rough recreation of the exercise we did.)

Question 2. Repeat the same procedure as above with the timer.

We, then, shared our answers and were like "WOW - WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD FULL OF POSSIBILITIES THAT LAY AHEAD ONCE WE GRADUATE AND WE'LL HAVE TIME AND MONEY." The top answers were spending more time with loved ones and self-care.

and then... she goes:

"Take your pen or pencil and cross out "If I had more time" and write above it... "I don't care to prioritize..."

Just in case you were wondering, here's mine:

Part 1:

Part 2:

This was something I thought about very heavily today as I reflected on 2022 and what I aim to accomplish in 2023.

Reset the year

Looking at the list I created, I realized that a lot of these things are not in order. For the reset to be more effective, let's re-organize the things on the list in order of importance.

Ranking your priorities

See below the updated list in order of most importance to least importance. In other words, what do I need to prioritize from this list? If the sun stopped shining, and the world stopped spinning - what would I regret the most about not prioritizing?

1. Spending time with parents and Penny.

The same still rings true for me today - spending more time with my parents and other loved ones (such as my puppy) is still number one for me. While I have a lot of intrinsic motivation, the top outside motivators for me will always be my parents and my loved ones. A lot of my life's decisions can be traced back to bettering life for those I care about, and that hasn't changed.

2/3 (TIED): Self-care and spirituality.

One of my biggest time-sinks right now is my 9-5 (which I haven't been treating like a 9-5). The harsh truth is that at the end of the day, a company is only here to make a profit. You can put your best effort into your job while you're on the clock, however, you need to leave your work thoughts when you clock out. It's interesting working remotely (for now), as it's hard to flip the switch when your gaming station, productivity station, music recording area, and your 9-5 desk are all in the same spot. It's harder to compartmentalize work this way, and since I can't change my external surrounding - I will need to change my internal thinking to make time for self-care and spirituality.

Kind reminder: any time of life is a good time to invest in yourself as a whole person, not just as a worker in the corporate world.

4. Travel.

It would be amazing to travel again since I love exploring new places and seeing new things. Pre-pandemic, I did a lot of traveling, however, I haven't done that as much recently. While it'd be fantastic to travel like a nomad, I don't think that's super realistic in my current circumstance. Not only does it require time, it also requires a decent amount of extra money. Unfortunately, I'm not at a place in my life where I can feasibly put my extra funds towards traveling - and you can argue that this means that this isn't a priority to me right now... which may be true.

5. Dating.

Lastly, dating is at the bottom of this list - since there are probably some other things I need to work on there to be fully available to someone (but that's another time and another story). You can argue that this isn't really a priority for me either.

Fin

For the last few weeks, I have been kind of all over the place with my thoughts and what I aim to accomplish. I didn't know a good way to streamline all of my thoughts and categorize them. It made looking toward 2023 harder because I just had one giant to-do list in my head of what I needed to accomplish. This exercise above really helped me to narrow down the different overarching themes and categories.

With the list now defined and refined - that gives us a good indication of what to work towards in the new year.