Happy New Year.

I don't do "new year's resolutions", I do goals and experiments.

The difference between a resolution and a goal is that a goal is about establishing where you want to end up, so that you remember to keep taking concrete steps in that direction. A resolution is about trying to talk yourself into staying motivated. A resolution is a tacit admission that you are not in control of yourself, and I am, so I don't make resolutions.

Experiments are a third category. An experiment is when you decide to TRY a certain lifestyle change to see if it "works" to carry you toward your goals without serious side-effects.

For New Year, I decided to begin some experiments:

1. I'm stopping the use of twitter because growing an account there is so slow that I'm not motivated to invest the time, and it's a slop-factory which is wasting my time doing anything else. This is actually not starting an experiment but rather ending one, which I started about 6 months ago to see if I could grow my twitter account.

2. I moved my computer into my office and for the most part, I'm leaving it here. As I type to you now, I'm in the office. My long term DREAM is to have a tech-free personal life and keep my computer equipment in an office setting for work purposes only.

It's been 5 days and this experiment has already helped me to understand that dream better. I don't have a TV in the living room, so without the computer I don't have access to YouTube. My YouTube feed is fairly high quality because I don't watch very often and I subscribe to interesting and informative channels. I don't think TV belongs in the living room, but it might be that this lifestyle is better with a home theater room of some kind.

Obviously I can watch YouTube in the office, as I'm writing to you now, but I am making a conscious effort to enter the office with objectives, and leave when those objectives are complete.

So far, I've been significantly more productive than I had before so I'm counting that as a win. Because this is an experiment, I can learn from it and make changes to it as I go, something I intend on doing.

So anyway, Happy New Year and this is why I might be posting a little bit less.