Happy new Gregorian year!

[kaberett]

Over on reddit: What are you keeping, adding, and leaving behind for 2023?

There was also one of these last year, which I found helpful and interesting at the time -- though I didn't comment.

... this year I have written... at least a novella, surely, which I have reproduced under the cut.

Keeping:

• My key. It's clicked for me that this is something I'm writing for my future self, rather than my current one (I don't want to be using more symbols than I can actually mentally keep track of!), and at this point I've made quite a few modifications.
  
• My "index"/"Inhalt". (I get twitchy about calling it an index on the basis that Words Mean Things, and if it's an index it's a shit one.)
  
• My annual migraine tracker, split across 6 pages/3 spreads, with symbols for symptoms.
  
• A long-term/someday todo list, now divided into contexts -- it felt like I wasn't using it much this year, but when I go back and look I actually did manage to tick a significantly non-zero number of items off it.
  
• Notes on Flight Rising (neopets but dragons and for grown-ups) familiars (Friends For Dragons) I'm still working on adding to my Pokédex collection. >>; (Familiar name, plus where to get the items I need to make/swap for it, or which other site activities I need to do, plus elemental regions where relevant...)
  
• Map of the garden: this one I'm only sort-of keeping, half of it by accident. In last year's journal I drew up three copies of the bed layout, one per page, so that I could keep track of crop rotation at a glance, and then on the fourth page I was noting sowing & harvest times & quantities. Having this year's layout in the notebook is definitely useful; I decided shortly after inking in the 2021 and 2022 beds that actually I'd rather keep long-term records in a separate notebook and only set myself up with this year's bed layouts etc in the current notebook. So: kept for this year, and intending to keep some of it in future, but definitely already planning to do things differently. (In the interests of remembering I've come to this decision, I have stuck a post-it on the relevant pages with a note to this effect.)
  
• A wishlist -- both as a way for me to remember what Treats I would like when I wish to have A Treet, and so that I can answer usefully when people ask me if there's anything I'd like!
  
• Quarterly Pilates tracker. Added this in the last quarter of 2022; I've got a list of exercises for the essentials/introductory, beginner, and intermediate programs, in the sequence I want to add them, colour-coded according to which program they first show up in, plus a note on the recommended number of reps for each (varies from 3 to 20...). I'm doing Pilates 2-3x per week, so at the top of the column I put the date; I then colour the box for each exercise to indicate what level I'm doing it at/what modifications I'm incorporating; and at the bottom of each column I note how long the sequence I did that day took me. It turns out having the visible record of getting better at this is something I'm finding motivating in itself, and it'll also be useful if I wind up going for a private lesson/wind up needing to rehab after an injury/etc.
  
• My five start-of-month pages: overview + birthdays + recurring monthly tasks, meal planning, gratitude, physio/exercise tracker, sleep/activity/etc tracker.
  
• My wee daily-task symbols under the day/date, coloured in when I've completed them.

Adding:

• FutureFrank-style future log, across 2 pages/1 spread. In 2021 I tried the Alistair method (1 page), and didn't get on with it; in 2022 I tried a Ryder-style Future Log (4 pages/2 spreads) and still felt like I was wasting a lot of space. 2023 is set up with birthdays actually written into the calendar in grey ink, and I'm using the empty space at the bottom for writing in tasks. So far I am really liking this for tasks that recur less often than monthly (changing toothbrush heads every three months!) but we'll see how I feel in February. :-p
  
• And, because I did things I... didn't intend to... when inking up the FutureFrank, I'm also adding another, less-structured, Future Log page to the very end of the notebook, for things I expect to happen or need to be aware of in 2024 & beyond. (I am very sure based on a couple of years' data, at this point, that the notebook I'm currently setting up will last me pretty much exactly one calendar year.)
  
• A list of all the physical (dead-tree) books I picked up from charity shops & the like because They Looked Interesting, but that I don't expect to want to keep once I've read them. Subdivided into fiction and non-fiction (and probably I should also add a poetry section...) I'm intending to work my way through a bunch of them and then get them back out of the house (to another charity shop, or similar). This collection will hopefully render itself redundant. If I make it through them all, I'll extend the list to include the shelf of books I think I probably do want to keep once I've read them, and then after that I'll think about doing the same with my ebooks...
  
• Pending/waiting is moving on to my monthly overview page! I tried having it as an annual collection last year, and just... did not use it at all after February, even when I remembered it existed. I thought this was going to be something I left behind entirely, and then a couple of weeks ago I saw the suggestion of setting it up monthly and something in my head went "ding!" It's been working well so far in December; I'm hoping it will stay useful.

Leaving:

• I thought I'd be listing the "pending"/"waiting on" page here, but see immediately above!
  
• I'm not managing to consume basically any audiovisual media at the moment, because migraine. The list of things I want to watch, and how many episodes I am into various shows, can stay in my 2022 journal unless and until something changes such that I expect to want to refer to it. (I was using it multiple times a week in 2021 and early 2022, but now? ... nah.) If I wind up migrating it, it'll probably go on the media consumption (i.e. dead tree books) page.
  
• An annual "skill acquisition" list. One of the ways I like doing reflection, regardless of time period, is thinking about things I've learned to do and skills I've acquired. I liked (and like) the idea of having a central list to refer back to ("when did I learn to do X?") but I forgot it existed and only put one thing on it all year. Going back through my monthly reflections is apparently the way I have to do this! (I could add "and migrate things to the Skill Acquisition page" to my monthly review process, but... eh.)
  
• A catalogue of what seeds I own. I've still got a post-it on an early page in my 2022 journal where I was sincerely intending to do this, but I wound up making it digitally and I'm going to stick with that.
  
• "Recipes to try". I found the longhand list useful in 2021, but barely touched it in 2022; working out how to manage this better is... a work in progress.

How about you? What's your 2023 set-up looking like? :)

Comments

[lassarina]

I'm actually for the first time trying a future log, and then I have my writing goals page and sections to note what I did writing-wise each month, my other goals and tracker pages, and then for the quarter, I have quarterly goals, looking forward to/hype for release, monthly goals, log, and to do, and then my weekly pages. I'll see how this goes. I experimented a little last year with not drawing up the weekly pages, and it turns out it irked me more than missing days in the drawn one did despite the saved time at the start of month, so we'll see.

[kaberett]

Oooh, good luck!