The new New Year

Tomorrow is February 29. A special day in the Gregorian Calendar and a sort of miniature Epoch, coming only every 4 years and marking a . Leap years are very special years. They are years for women to make the first move, Olympic years and big celebrations for Leaplings. A leap year and the date that makes it leap is calendarial occasion.

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about life choices and directions. Making plans and goals, getting a delicious feeling of organisation and preparedness and it seems that for me, this minor historic date can be a marker for a new start in life. A new New Years, if you will. The official New Years come so fast after Christmas and is such a whirl of parties and recovery, getting back to work and making impossible plans that it become too cluttered and stopped being a proper celebration.

By February 29 you should have started and maybe failed some New Years Resolutions. You can set new, more realistic goals for the year. You have had time to take stock and take action. February 29 is the New Year we need for the big decisions.

We often hear about three year plans and five years plans. Why not a 4 year plan, marked by the arrival of Feb 29? Makes sense to me. A natural date that occurs so rarely you must pay attention to it . A finite end point for a project. If you haven’t got it done by then it’ll be another 4 years and big pile of fail.

So I have decided to make February 29 the new New Year and I have decided to set myself some goals of where I would like to be by the time the next Feb 29 rolls around. Not getting into specifics, they’re along the lines of:

1. Save for a house deposit and have purchased my first property.

2. Get a new job. (There are quite a few specifics to this one).

3. Reach an intermediate level of German language skills and finally button down some basic French.

4. Start my career as an investor.

5. Build a wardrobe of beautiful clothes that I love and am proud of.

Yeah, they're practical and sort of 'standard', but they're not goals I can achieve by the end of 2012. They all need time and money. So they are goals for 4 years time, 29 February 2016.

Do you have any long-term goals? Are you the sort of person who needs a date to work towards?