Taking life a month at a time

Creativity in 2020: Part 1 of 5

I’m planning a newsletter series about creativity that will go deeper into concepts and practical tips that I’ve touched on before: recognizing burnout, allowing yourself to explore creativity outside your day job, learning to ask the right questions to know what you want, and more. But when I started outlining what that series would look like, it felt like the perfect way to start a new year … and as much as it feels as if we’ve lived a decade already in 2020, the year is far from over yet.

All that got me thinking about that New Year’s resolution feeling and how difficult it is to maintain it over the course of an entire 12 months. Don’t get me wrong – I love New Year’s resolutions. I’m definitely not one of those people who says, “Oh, if you want to do it, you should just do that thing right this second immediately.” If you have that kind of energy, godspeed. I don’t. I need to prepare. I need a plan. That’s how I function best creatively and for life in general. But while I believe it’s useful (and fun!) to set specific goals in a certain time frame, I also think a year is too long a stretch; you need to break the time into smaller, more manageable chunks.

A while back, I read Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project, and her approach of taking one month of the year at a time for goal-setting really clicked with me. If you haven’t read it, Rubin wanted to find ways to be happier in everyday life, so she chose specific themes and goals to focus on for each month of the year. I enjoy the month-long approach because it gives me that New Year’s resolution feeling of a fresh start and new things to explore on the first of every month, not just in January. A month is enough time to start a new habit, but it’s also not so long that you’ve wasted a ton of time if you try out something that isn’t working for you.

We now have about five months left of 2020, and I’d like to take the opportunity to check in on what you would like to accomplish, learn and explore before the end of the year with five newsletters.

First of all, let’s just acknowledge together that this has been an incredibly strange year. Remember when 2020 was shiny and new? Maybe you had New Year’s resolutions that have (understandably) gone by the wayside with everything that has happened since then. That’s OK.

Second, this exercise is absolutely not about finding the one big thing you need to accomplish with your life in the next five months. We’re not finding a vaccine for COVID-19 or solving any of society’s enormous problems with this little newsletter; we’re simply trying to survive one of the most bizarre years in human history with as much grace and joy as we can muster.

All that being said … what do you want the rest of your 2020 to look like? Are there stories you need to take in, things you need to create, interests or passions you’d like to explore before we turn the calendar to 2021? I certainly hope so.

For me, I have five more months of a year-long reading project that has brought out the best and worst in my planning skills and my approach to hobbies and interests. (Spoiler alert: SO. MANY. LISTS.) I wanted to read more contemporary adult fiction. That’s an ambitious yet vague goal, and whenever I wandered over to the recent adult fiction shelves in the past, I didn’t know where to start. So I turned it into a project and created a podcast detailing my personal framework to approaching adult fiction … as one does, in the year of our Lord 2020, when no one has bothered to make the exact podcast you need even though there seem to be so many.

Using Rubin’s 1-month approach, I chose a specific genre/theme in adult fiction to focus on for every month of the year. Dystopian societies in February, fantasy in April, thrillers in July, etc. Something finally clicked that had never clicked when I was picking up random titles on the shelves and trying them out. Reading one genre each month let me home in on that reading experience and think about whether or not I enjoyed it and wanted to pick up more books by that author or from that same genre. My reading life feels bigger and more full of possibility than it has in at least a decade as I figure out which genres I want more from and which ones aren’t usually a great fit for me.

I’m also learning more self-awareness (I hope) as I realize how much I tend to turn any hobby or interest into a project. There’s a fine line … on the one hand, writing a new podcast episode each month has been a wonderful outlet to talk about the books I’ve loved and a satisfying way to keep a record of the experience. But of course, being me, I’ve also noticed my own tendencies to grade myself and to be overly ambitious and pushy with how much I can “accomplish” – even though this project was, is and will continue to be something I do for pure fun and enjoyment. I talk a lot about putting down books that aren’t compelling for you, no matter the reason and regardless of how popular, “important,” or critically acclaimed the book is, and every single month I learn over again to practice what I preach.

You definitely don’t have to take on a book-related project for the last five months of the year, but I hope my reading framework gets you thinking about the big objectives, maybe the ambitious yet ephemeral ways you want your life to change, and whether you can reshape them into smaller, more doable goals.

In the rest of this series, we’ll talk more about regularly checking in with yourself on where you are vs. where you want to be and learning to ask the right questions. We’ll defy the hustle. We’ll keep seeking joy, even when it’s not easy. I hope you’ll stick around.