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?

New Year resolutions: the 2012 edition

Photo courtesy of moshpitson.

I think the problem with most 'resolutions' is that people set themselves challenges or targets they cannot possible hope to achieve. They plan to go to the gym every day, loose 15kgs, sew a new dress a week; start with mad enthusiasm in January but in the long term, simply cannot balance out the demands of their 'resolutions' with the demands of their daily lives.

The best resolution I ever made was to learn to like the foods I didn't like. What makes this resolution good is that it requires progresive year-long dedication and minimal effort, making it relatively easy to keep. Don't like olives? Be sure to order pizzas with olives until you like the flavour. Simple. It worked a treat and with the exception of capsicum, I succeeded in changing my taste buds by years' end.

For the last few years I haven't made resolutions so much as goals for the year. They're less specific than resolutions and are more of a guide for positive personal change. For instance, last year I wanted to do at least 2 hours of exercise a week and have at least 3 alcohol free days a week. This year I have the same goals and also some projects that I want to do, complete with plans and time lines. Oh yeah, organisation.

So the back pages of my diary look something like this:

Projects

• Improve my German language skills.
• Re-learn how to sew and have made at least one dress by the end of the year.
• Finish off my Vietnam diary, complete with photos.
• Undertake a selection of DIY projects.
  
• Forward plan my life for 2013-2014.

Goals

• At least 2 hours proper exercise per week and get fit.
  
• At least 3 alcohol-free days a week.
• Save money. I do have a specific amount, I just ain't putting it here.
• Keep a written and financial diary every day.
• Keep at least some of my herbs alive for the whole year.
  
• Consider doing a detox of some sort. (Clearly I can't commit to this just yet)

This is quite a lot to do, so I have made a New Years Resolution:

Be more proactive!

A Pair and a Spare have an awesome blog post about making and keeping new years resolutions.