Despite all my recent talk about doing things and resuming old practices, I didn’t make any resolutions for the New Year. I haven’t for a while, choosing instead to re-examine existing, desired, and otherwise routines to see what fits, what doesn’t, and what might work better if it were tweaked.
This re-examination requires a three-step process: ‘Look at the calendar,’ ‘Look at the list of tasks’, and ‘Look at current twitchiness.’ I don’t do the vision board thing (long story), and manifesting seems like just asking to get into trouble with the Greater Good, or in grace with the Greater Evil, whichever one is listening. Kidding. Mostly, but not about vision boards.1 I know manifestation is less about playing Ouija with the universe than it is about psyching oneself up to be more attentive to opportunities to move closer to one’s goals.
I also check my routines when I pick up a new paper planner or try/re-try an electronic planning system, which I do more than I should. For 2025, I’ve dropped the messy mix of Azure DevOps Boards, Todoist, and several Microsoft Outlook and Google Calendars that I was using to keep track of things for an old-school return to a Moleskine XL Planner, with a few recurring timeboxing alerts set up on my phone.2
Is it working?
Ask me in March. I should have figured out the professional education routine by then.
- I transferred between several institutions before I finished my bachelor’s degree program. Because of this, I lost academic credits because of institutional policies about rejecting STEM courses that were more than ten years old.
I have retaken introductory courses (e.g. Introduction to Computers), because the only way I could challenge having to spend money and time taking a class that covered material I learned more than thirty years ago and kept current due to work experience was to pay the same amount of money and spend the same amount of time creating a vision board that illustrated how I would use my experiential knowledge to benefit society.
Arguing with a transcript evaluator that this basic knowledge was a pre-requisite for the advanced coursework the institution had already agreed to accept got me nowhere. I could have sued. I could have also paid up and spent a term cutting out pictures from magazines and gluing them to posterboard while biting a hole in my tongue to remind me that I needed to pretend I had only cheerful feelings about the colossal waste of time.
This was pre-AI, y’all. If it weren’t, I would have handed buckets of contempt to an LLM, asked it to translate the mess into Positive Vibes, apologized for the inconvenience, and thanked it. I always thank AIs, just in case. ↩︎ - I no longer have alarms for my son’s going to the bus, after-school activities, and to bed on school nights, but he still stops whatever he’s doing when he hears the Apple “Playtime” ringtone. ↩︎
Modus Dementi 