Starting the New Year Off Softly

By now, you've probably made New Year's Resolutions if you were going to. But if you haven't and you're a little behind (Resolution: Better time management!), I'd like to make a modest suggestion:

Don't do it.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm a planner. You know that.

But a New Year's Resolution is like the worse parts of business planning: It's wanting to write for the New Yorker but not querying them. It's wanting to exercise but not putting on your running shoes. As you can tell, I disdain them.

But it's not for lack of trying them. Like my fellow freelancer Jenny Cromie, I've had the experience of making a lot of resolutions whose only purpose seems to be to give me something to feel bad about. It's like the term "me-time." Don't you just want to throw your running shoe and your New Yorker at the screen when I write that? A cloying phrase that belies the very real conflicts we all do have in our days that make me-time another bludgeon with which to pummel ourselves.

Instead of a resolution, consider adopting a guiding principle. Mine is gentleness.

Here's why: My business plan is ambitious. And I am, in general, a pretty ambitious person. But all that ambition can sometimes tip over into obsessive self-judgement--a state I like to call, simply, self-cruelty.

It doesn't help and it often hurts me by blinding me to what I've done well and keeping me so self-obsessed that I can't be of service to my clients. Nothing derails me and sucks the serenity out of the room like self-cruelty.

So for me, the guiding principle for 2009 is gentleness.

For you, it may be different: If you make plans you don't keep, it may be discipline. If you tend toward the negative side of the street, maybe it's optimism or kindness.

And then, when I start feeling uncomfortable with something I'm doing, I ask myself, "Is this gentle? If not, is there a gentler way to get the same result?"

That, I'd say, is a much better use of my prognostic abilities.

What's your guiding principle?

Serenity Tool: Time is of the Essence

I bought this cute little strawberry timer the other week with the intention of timing my oatmeal on the stove. But this week I found another use for it:

Setting it to give my body a break. Here's what Dr. Davis Liu, author of Stay Healthy, Live Longer, Spend Wisely recommended to me this week:

1. Get yourself a timer.
2. Set it for one hour.
3. At the end of the hour, do some shoulder shrugs, exercise your wrists, shoulders chest and back.
4. Practice a minute of deep breathing
5. Get back to work.

As he put it, "Is anything really going to fall apart if you leave your desk for five minutes?"

My answer was no.

I discovered that that small, antiquated piece of machinery could make my body happier and make my job less dangerous to my health.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, writers and editors reported 220 injuries on the job severe enough to miss at least one day of work in 2006, the most recent date for which statistics are available. None of them, oddly, were in the repetitive strain category (which tells me, more than anything, that writers aren't reporting them to their bosses, or, like us, they're self-employed). What I know from my own experience, though, is that when I sit for a long time and then stand up, my body feels welded in place, and my stress level grows.

I don't know much about Chinese medicine, but is sure feels like my qi is blocked. Just saying.

I did this yesterday--imperfectly--and it was a relief. Oddly, it served another purpose: It helped me be mindful of how I was spending my time and helped me track how I was spending my time.

Give it a shot today and see how it feels.