#yearly theme

So I don't really do "New Year Resolutions," I do the (popularized by CGPGrey) is Yearly Themes. A theme, usually one word, that you would like to focus on for a year or a season that tries to tune to towards life goals.

This years theme is "The year of touching grass"

With the alternate title of "the year of PLEASE DO ANYTHING ELSE OTHER THAN BE ON YOUR PHONE OR IPAD!"Don't worry this isn't an anti-tech or phone post. Just… man the doom scrolling was bad this year. and that needs to change if I want to accomplish anything.

I wrote a long blog post about this here linked here: Rambles well written, but the highlights are:

limiting my time on Social Media (and treating Bluesky and the like more of a promotion platform)

using forums instead

making a youtube playlist for when I do chores or workout

use rss instead of apps to follow people where I can

I would also like to compartmentalized my life, both in terms of living spaces and possibly even devices. I would have added that to the blog but I forgot

I also called it the year of touching grass because I want to get out more, even if its going to a thrift store, or the library. I can't keep spending all my time in a condo. Hell when it gets warmer, I need to implement "sun breaks" while I'm at the condo which would be smoke breaks but just chill outside on the balcony.

I also called it the year of touching grass because I want to get out more, even if its going to a thrift store, or the library. I can't keep spending all my time in a condo. When it gets warmer, I'll to implement "sun breaks" which would be smoke breaks but just chill on the balcony.

Long story short I need to do more than just scroll on my phone to desktop, and social media has been such a damper that I want to not use it like I have been.

The Update on how my Yearly theme is going and my plans going forward!

The theme for 2022 was resilience. Over this past year most of us have gotten at least one lesson on the importance of resilience, whether it was because of a job loss, a major change in a relationship, a death in the family, or because their entire social life was upended. However, the fact is, life changes, and sometimes changes a lot in a very short period of time. Fragility is the natural…

As an experiment, I’m organizing my 2023 into 13 three-week periods, each followed by a one-week break. This idea came about while thinking about planners and the new year.

This structure is interesting because 13 x (3 + 1) = 52, which is both the number of weeks in a year and the number of playing cards in a standard deck.

Each card in the deck could represent a week, but I will use one suit per year and have each card in the suit represent a period. Using one suit per year allows each suit [♠️,♥️,♦️,♣️] to express a Yearly Theme, as regularly discussed on Cortex.

Periods for 2023

For 2023, I selected ♥️, so the year breaks down like this:

A♥️: 01/02/2023–01/20/2023

2♥️: 01/30/2023–02/17/2023

3♥️: 02/27/2023–03/17/2023

4♥️: 03/27/2023–04/14/2023

5♥️: 04/24/2023–05/12/2023

6♥️: 05/22/2023–06/09/2023

7♥️: 06/19/2023–07/07/2023

8♥️: 07/17/2023–08/04/2023

9♥️: 08/14/2023–09/01/2023

T♥️: 09/11/2023–09/29/2023

J♥️: 10/09/2023–10/27/2023

Q♥️: 11/06/2023–11/24/2023

K♥️: 12/04/2023–12/22/2023

A Discovery and an Observation

From the Nomenclature section on Wikipedia:

Tens may be either abbreviated to T or written as 10.

Using T to represent a Ten is nice because I can use two characters to represent each period. Another nicety is beginning the year with an Ace — it’s like starting out already on top.

Reflection

Hopefully, this system will be helpful. Because I was not planning on having a planning system, this may be a case of “easily imagined, easily forgotten.”

Another fun consideration is that while I know what ♥️ means to me, I have a whole year to think about what ♠️, ♦️, and ♣️ will represent.

Either year of introspection, year of motivation, year of discovering or just year of relaxing