Annd MORE than 4 months this time. 6 actually. Good thing I never committed to writing consistently. In my last post “Whirlwind” I described how life was keeping me busy. Turns out this is probably won’t change anytime soon.

Since it’s a new year it’s time to pick a new annual theme! Last years theme was “Focus” and I’ll have to say it was hit or miss. While I was able to keep focus on a number of small things in the moment, the big picture was frenetic. As is my curse, “Always my soul hungered for less than it had…”¹ which in this context means there are too many thing I want to learn and explore and discover and do, and never (NEVER) enough time to give all of them the time they deserve. So when I tried to focus on one thing for a day, I often ended up exploring 2-3 other running projects in stead.

It’s OK that I didn’t stay focused on focus since that’s the point of the theme! I’m going to give “Focus” a round 2 as a sub-theme this year because I enjoyed the cues it gave me along the way last year, but I think I need a different theme this year to take the focus I want to find and channel it. To that end I am picking “Attention” as this years theme and picking a specific item I want to give my attention to each month. Weather it’s a specific project or goal or challenge, I’ll commit to it for the month. When I have a free moment or and trying to decide which of the dozens of active things I want to work on, I’ll give my attention to that thing. If I don’t like it? Tough. It’s only a month. If I hate that plan after the first few months, that’s OK, I’ll change it to a shorter timeline.

The topic of Attention for January will be planning. I’m good at planning, but I think I actually need to give myself sometime to think though all the projects and tasks and goals I have so I can prioritize them to pick for subsequent months. Work will be pretty dynamic this year as well so I’ll need to plan my topics accordingly.

Off the top of my head some of the topics might include:

• ROS
• Calisthenics
• Japanese Language
• HAM Radio
• Writing
• Drawing
• Hacking

Some of these are easier picked up at any time than others (calisthenics for example….probably better for an hour each morning and left at that so I can recover) but I may pick a few that complement each other. My hope is that by giving each of these things a little more deliberate attention I will make long strides in getting some of my intended projects DONE instead of just dabbling with them until they are hard, and circling back to them months later.

Wish me luck and at a minimum, see you at the end of the month. (oh yeah, P.s. I’ll write a post each month about what my attention item is partly to outline what I mean, and partly to keep me on track. Here it goes!)