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Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

I hope that everyone had a great Christmas, and I wish you all a Happy New Year!

I love Christmas—I appreciate the extra focus on the Savior of the World, Jesus Christ. I like the chance to spend extra time with family and friends. I love the meaningful and enjoyable traditions. I also really like having a stay-at-home vacation—time off but not time away from familiar places.

New Year’s is great too. I like the chance to examine my life and make resolutions, even though I don’t keep all of them. The act of examining myself periodically really helps me to understand where I’m at and especially where I’m going. The end of one year and the beginning of the next provides us all with an incentive to “right the ship.”

Brain Dump

One of my favorite ways to go about setting a course for my life is what I like to call a “brain dump”—rapidly “pouring” the contents of your brain onto paper. I sit down with several sheets of paper and write down everything I can think of that I would like to do, see, or achieve in my life, especially focusing on, but not limited to, the new year.

After I’ve spent what feels like a good amount of time doing this, I categorize my ideas. The categories that my goals and plans usually fall into include spiritual, exercise, creative/talent, financial, educational, and recreational areas. Once most of my ideas have been categorized, I like to prioritize what I have. During the year, I work on the top priorities, and that way when I don’t finish by the end of the year, I know that I have achieved what was most important to me. While I’m prioritizing, I copy over goals from last year that didn’t get done and that are still worth doing and I assign them new priorities (whether higher or lower)

I usually flesh out some of my ideas at this point—I think scheduling, required resources, price, and whatever detail I feel is important and that I might forget later. This phase is really a work in progress, too—the most immediate tasks usually get worked on first. This step is super important to me—it removes many of the unknowns and breaks my large goals into managable pieces.