I’m not one for resolutions. To me, they often felt too rigid, prescriptive. Or maybe that was the perfectionist who understood goals as all or nothing, not only in the what but the how.

I do, though, pick a word or theme for the year. I think I first picked up the idea from a post by Cate Houston (I could go back in the archives & confirm, but I’m trying to get this written & practicing letting little things go sometimes).

Reflecting on 2023’s word

Unusually, I didn’t write about my word last year. I did pick one, but it never made it to the blog. It didn’t even make it on a post-it by my desk. So when my husband asked me what my word was last year, it took me a while to resurrect.

Space.

2023 was meant to be a year to carve out space. To not fill my days with more. To commit to shaping spaces, physical & temporal, to better support my life.

We had just moved into a new home, same city but a place that we own pay the bank (rather than a landlord) for each month. We wanted to create a comfortable living space. We did.

I ran a lot of races in 2022, and Gene was training for Ironman. We’ve been talking for years about mountain adventures we wanted to go on, but training and events limited the time. In 2023, we committed to keeping space in our schedules for those outings, and we had some incredible days in the mountains together and with friends.

At work, I stepped back from a few things that were not really serving what I needed to focus on. It was fortuitous I suppose, as personal and professional events placed more demands on my time. The space I created was rapidly filled, then over filled. Whole it was a successful year in many regards, I didn’t succeed at holding that space.

2024: A year for systems

This year, I’m doing something unusual. I’m taking a word someone else set for their year.

Well, that’s not quite right. It’s something I kept finding my focus drawn to over the past many months, especially as work got busier and some things were sliding far down the priority list. Systems also kept coming up in my reading, listening, and conversations. I just hadn’t found the single word I was looking for until seeing Ryan Holiday’s post last week.

2024 is a year of preparation. Next year, I will be managing a large project at work—the sort that keeps our institute running, or not. This year, we are undertaking planning work, essential to the project.

But that’s not the only preparation I need. I know from prior and ongoing experience that other work doesn’t stop just because we have this big thing going. There’s still the day to day. There are still new shiny objects that can be hard to ignore. There are still the unplanned changes that throw things out of balance.

This is where systems come in. The truth is, in many cases, I have systems—but they’re not always explicitly articulated or working optimally. How do we make decisions about which projects to start or stop? I have guidelines, but they’re mostly in my head. How do we make information about complex processes, in particular the “institutional knowledge”, more accessible? I know shared notes and process documents will improve our recall and reduce reliance on individual memories, yet that’s the work that’s easily forgotten when we get busy or just tired.

Whether they’re working well or not, whether they are operating as intended or not… Systems are embedded and shape our behaviors. If we want them to work for us, to improve our lives, we have to build/borrow/use them with intention.

This is my time to do that.