A really late New Year’s resolutions post
1. Spend quality time with my close friends
An important factor in making friendships work is being located physically close to each other. Currently, most of the people who I care about are no more than a 15 minute walk away. But in just a couple months, I’ll be leaving the institution that has kept us together for all these years. And while I hope to continue to maintain these ties post-graduation, living in different cities will make it really really difficult. So I’m going to really cherish this last semester, and of course we’re gonna have an epic, unforgettable spring break road trip.
How I’ll know if I’ve succeeded: There’s no good way to quantify this one, so I’ll just judge based on feels.
2. Reach out to people outside my orbit
As an introvert, this one has always been a perennial goal. I’ve been making progress—in middle school, I only hung out with my tiny circle of nerds. In high school, I started to diversify my friend group when I joined our breaks-all-demographic-stereotypes high school debate team as a second semester senior. And in college, I joined AFX Dance, Cal Cycling, and Hackers at Berkeley partially to meet new people outside of my classes.
Casually interacting with people is fine and dandy, but what I think I need to practice more of is holding one-on-one, more complex conversations with relative strangers (for example: that large contingent of Facebook friends who I’ve met at one point but can’t figure out when or where anymore). I’ll be making a more concerted effort to set up such meetings.
How I’ll know if I’ve succeeded: At the end of the semester I’ll look at my calendar and count the number of times I’ve scheduled time to meet with people outside of CS/EECS. Hopefully it’ll be more than a relatively reasonable goal of once per week (or 14 for the semester).
3. Write and reflect more
For years, I kept a daily journal (read: diary) in which I wrote about what I did each day. Then around January 2015, I stopped out of laziness. I’m not going to restart that practice, but I do think it’s important to take time every once in a while to pause, look inward, and reflect on your internal state. Why? I feel like the way I approach life is to take each day as it comes, fully immersing myself in the now, without figuring out whether what I’m doing is truly important and recalibrating processes. Plus philosophizing about things makes you seem intelligent. So expect to see more of this type of post over the next few months!
How I’ll know if I’ve succeeded: I hope to write at least one of these per week.
4. Run a half-marathon
In 2015, I took 4.5 million steps, but last year, I only took 4.4 million steps. This is an incredibly troubling trend that must be reversed. Clearly, the answer is to commit to running a half-marathon.
OK, that’s actually a terrible reason. I tried to think of a large, compelling reason for why I’m doing this, and I came up blank. There are a bunch of small reasons though: it’s on my bucket list, it makes you sound like a legit athlete, I care about being fit and this will definitely make me more fit, I consider it primarily a mental challenge in perseverance and discipline and not a physical challenge, etc. So maybe if you put all of those together, that’s compelling enough.
How I’ll know if I’ve succeeded: well obviously, whether or not I run the half-marathon. I’m aiming to run one in April, and I’ll keep track of my training progress on Strava.
5. Consistently wake up early every day
There’s the saying that there are only two types of people in the world: those who have a bajillion alarms in their iPhone Clock app, and those who only have one. I definitely belong to the former camp. But wouldn’t it be so badass to just have one alarm? Yes. Yes it would.
How I’ll know if I’ve succeeded: I use a service called Gyroscope, which integrates data from my Apple Watch, RescueTime, and other services to predict when I’m awake or when I’m sleeping. I’ll check my average wake up time throughout the semester, and if it’s before 8 AM, then I’ll be happy.There are definitely more than 5 things I want to change about myself, but 5 is a nice round number so I’ll leave it at that. Check back in May to see how many of these I’ve succeeded at!