I’m sure I’ve written about this before.
I don’t believe in the standard form of New Year’s Resolutions. Set a goal to complete for an entire year? It’s a monstrosity. Impossible. No human being with a proper supply of laziness and dearth of attention span should be capable of keeping a promise like “work out every day,” “eat vegetables every day,” or “fight lions every day” for an entire year.
So I like to break it up into a month-by-month regime. Could I read a book for 30 minutes a night for an entire year? Pfft. Something will come up. But can I muster it for a month? Man, I’m only two weeks away. I can do this.
Ideally, I’d love to be able to take on a project like this every month, year-round. I’ll usually run out of steam by like April. At which point, though, I’ll have accomplished three New Year’s Resolutions, instead of failing at one. Ha!
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This year’s January resolution was to stop using an alarm clock. And in fact, for the past 31 days I’ve been relying solely on circadian rhythm to get me up at an appropriate hour. I’ve read and been told multiple times about how disruptive the alarm clock is, and how it’s fairly rotten for your health to be regularly jolted awake in the middle of the wrong part of a sleep cycle.
I can definitely say that going alarm-less has its perks. Waking up is fairly pleasant, now! Sometimes I’m a little late, sure. (Good thing I’ve got a really rotten boss to answer to.) But typically, I’m no more delayed than I’d otherwise be if I had hit the snooze button a thousand times. And there’s really a special feeling to waking up and lazing in bed for a bit before getting on my way. The kind of thing you typically experience on Sunday at 2pm, when you wake up after first falling asleep at 6am after a silly amount of partying or eating junk food and playing video games the night before. It’s not totally the same, knowing that I in fact will have to carry out some work in the near future. But it’s close. And in this case, quantity (every day!) more than makes up for quality (those few extra, extra minutes of sloth).
My biggest problem with the program is the weather, really. St Louis has had its fair share of weather binges these days, and when it’s cloudy outside for a week straight, I find it far more difficult for my system to tell the difference between 8:00am and 9:30. Then again, I probably just hate the weather and am just looking for more excuses to hate it.
Overall, I think I’m going to stick with the clock-less program. I’ll still keep an alarm handy – but only for special occasions. And even then, I suspect the novelty of waking up to an alarm will outweigh the misery of its cacophony.
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Next month I’ll be working on physical training. I’m teaming up with my friend Ian, and by the end of the month, we hope we’ll be able to do a set of one-arm pushups [Update: Craig’s joining us!]. I may not have access to a gym and be able to squat 300 pounds (for now)…but I think the one-arm push up is a fairly reputable feat of strength. Given that I’m already loosely in shape and have a high propensity for push ups, I think we’ll be able to accomplish it. Here’s the video we’re following, if you want to tag along, too. It’s corny as hell, fair warning.
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As for March: In case I forget, or can’t come up with something cooler, I think I’m going to shoot for a whole month without using Social News Aggregator sites. See ya Digg, Reddit, Popurls, Delicious. So long, the-unproductive-half-of-the-feeds in my Google Reader. At least, we think. For now.
Have you got any thoughts?