Week 03/2022: The list is done!

Week of 17 January 2022

My 22 for 2022 list

This is week three of 2022 and I’m still taking my own advice and settling in to the year, working out what I want to achieve this year and what I want to focus my attention on.

I’m finding the situation with covid frightening, and there are other things going on outside of that, which are adding to my uncertainty. As a result, my anxiety and stress levels are a lot higher than normal. I know that I’m not okay when things I normally wouldn’t even worry about, like a cafe unexpectedly giving me coffee in a takeaway cup, causes me to lose the plot.

I don’t have a lot of bandwidth to take on new projects or do things that are way outside my comfort zone right now, and my main focus is on keeping myself safe and healthy. I’m not looking to make massive scale changes to my life at this point in time.

But I also don’t want to shut down completely. I have work to do, I have creative work that I love and relationships to maintain. And I have to look after myself. Part of this is maintaining good habits and routines to keep me grounded, and blogging is one of the things I do to keep that sense of structure I need in my life.

So, onward.

Over the last three weeks (this is taking a long time!) I’ve been going over a bunch of notes I’ve been making, my 2021 journal, my 2022 Unravel Your Year workbook, my lists of unfinished projects, dreams and goals. I’ve sorted a lot of this material into seven themes.

In last week’s post,  I said I wanted to

• refine my focus areas for the year
• settle on up to three areas that are most important to me now and that I want to blog about
• make the 22 for 2022 list with things from those areas
• identify a habit for each area to start to put in place.

This week, I’ve taken the seven themes and narrowed them down to three areas where I want to make progress in the first quarter of 2022, which are

• supporting my body and mind
• engaging in meaningful work
• exploring (I added this one for fun).

I’ve made my 22 for 2022 list based on this. I know I said I wanted to make it more like a list of single actions that I could complete fairly quickly and cross off the list, but it hasn’t turned out that way and there are several things on here that will take weeks or even months to do. I’ve added timings to try and give myself more direction than I had last year, which was basically “do the things whenever”.

Some of these timings spill over into the second three months but I’ll worry about them after the end of March. Actually, I’m not worrying about too much beyond February. The dates after February are vague targets that I’ll review at the end of every month because I think some major things could change very quickly and completely mess up any tightly woven plans. So I only want to plan out a month at a time and work on doing things rather than planning things.

To help me maintain the structure and routine that’s so important to me at the moment, I hope to write a post each week about the progress I made in the things I wanted to work on that week, like I did last year. But I’m also going to make a plan for the next week that I can report back on. This is supposed to keep me more accountable than just hoping I do things and writing about what I did (and didn’t) do each week.

I’m also working on putting new habits in place for these three areas, which I’m writing about here. I didn’t quite get there this week.

And just to spice things up, here’s a list of 22 (well, actually, eight at the moment, but there will be 22 at some point during the year) recipes I want to try out in 2022.

The list at January 2022

Supporting my body and mind

1. Complete the MindSpot Wellbeing program (20 February)

2. See a nutritionist (April)

3. Learn about food waste and make a menu plan that minimises waste (read Use It All and Simplicious Flow) (end of May—make this a habit)

4. Talk to my GP about a health issue I’m concerned about (April)

5. Sort out my kombucha supplies and start brewing it regularly (make this a habit) (end of March)

6. Grow something in the veggie bed I cleared out in 2021 (March)

7. Get a strength training program (make this a habit) (April)

Meaningful work

8. Complete my TAFE course for work (24 June)

9. Manage a small project at work using the project management tools I learned on the course in January (end of June)

10. Read Deep Work and make a summary of key takeaways and actions (end of January)

11. Review the Priority Samurai course material and identify actions (end of February)

12. Building on things 10 and 11, make a handbook for deep work, managing distractions and prioritising rest (including trialing Cal Newport’s time blocking planner and making a new weekly review) (end of February)

13. Sort out my Todoist and get rid of all the outdated tasks (13 February)

14. Get a Strengthsfinder assessment (April)

15. Create a system for managing new information at work (end of April)

16. Complete the 30-day voice course (end of March)

17. Complete the 30-day writing bootcamp (end of February)

18. Complete the Australian Writers’ Centre Content Writing course (end of March)

19. Complete the Australian Writers’ Centre Profile Writing course (end of April)

20. Complete the Australian Writers’ Centre Romance Writing course (end of May)

Exploring

21. Read the books in the 2022 Dymocks Reading Challenge (my 2022 reading list) (12 month goal)

22. Complete the Cosmic Calibration course and give feedback (end of February)

My process for getting to this point was quite detailed and I’ll write another post about how I went about it another time, because it was (at least for me) something a bit different and helped me to really clarify what I wanted to do. It was also a good lesson in how to get from 119 things to 22. This isn’t to say I’m not going to do any of the remaining 97 things, because I’m pretty sure I can find the time to replace some dead pot plants and season a fry pan no matter what my main areas of focus are.

What do I want to do next week?

• Identify a habit for each area to start to put in place (or something to stop doing)
• Make a plan to do the things I want to do in February
• Make a list of actions from Deep Work to feed into my “deep work” handbook (and find a better name for this!)

Weekly review

What I’m reading this week

• The Founding of Hobart 1803-1804 by Frank Bolt
• Circle of Nine by Josephine Pennicott

Habit tracker

• Days I went for a walk in the morning (Goal = 7): 7
• Days I worked on my art (Goal = 2): 7
• Days I read a book (Goal = 7): 7
• Days I had a lunch break away from my desk (Goal = 4 work days): 4
• Days I went for a walk or did other physical activity in the afternoon (Goal = 5): 7
• Days I shut my computer down before 9.30 (Goal = 6): 6