Well, that went fast. It’s been about 5 weeks since I last posted. That clearly violates my aforementioned commitment to post once a week for all of 2020. There are a few reasons I didn’t post. I had some very stressful things going on in my life, even as the broader world was roiled in the effects of these ongoing pandemics of Covid and racism. There were plenty of voices to absorb and mine didn’t feel especially important. I’m not saying that to be self-deprecating, I mean that truly I did not think was necessary for me to “speaking” when there was plenty of listening that I needed to do.

The good news (for me) is that when this year started, I had given myself a cushion. My commitment to writing every week was a sincere intention, but there’s a broader context. I love planning for new beginnings – a new year, a new season, the start of a job, or moving to a new home. I often make New Year’s resolutions that fade in a month or two. Gretchen Rubin, who has written a lot about cultivating personal happiness through changes in every day behavior, insists that intentionally managing one’s habits (both good and bad) is the key to living a life aligned with your values and knowing yourself is key to managing habits. One thing I’ve learned about myself in the last few years is that I love ritual and routine, and I really love building out elaborate plans for how I will achieve a goal, but I struggle with rigidity. I absolutely cannot stick to any health plan that requires tracking calorie intake and I tend to give up on anything as soon as I break a streak. I can make my bed 23 days in a row, skip one day and my brain says the whole thing has gone to shit and that’s the end of bed making for me.

Going into 2020, I knew that any plans I made had to have some wiggle room, or I would never stick to them. And I felt very sure that the thing I most wanted to conquer was the thing I described above: the ridiculous all or nothing approach. So, I came up with an 85% Plan. I identified 5 daily practices and 5 weekly items that I wanted to make into habits, but my goal was to do them 85% of the time for the year.

The daily items are:

• Planning out my day every morning
• Meditating
• Exercising
• Writing
• Reviewing my day every evening to see how the plan went

The weekly items are:

• Consume 7 or fewer alcoholic beverages per week (to meet recommended health standards)
• Complete at least one food prep task that will make eating-on-the-go easier (i.e. – make a batch of energy bites, or cut up vegetables for snacking on)
• Create a weekly plan for what I wanted and needed to get done each week
• Post 1 blog post
• Open and deal with snail mail (to avoid the pile I ignore until I can’t any more and then hate myself)

Then I decided I would accept an overall average, in case, for example, daily meditation became harder than I thought, but I miraculously knocked it out of the park with food prep, I might still hit 85% overall.

I put together an elaborate tracking spreadsheet, which gave me great joy, so I don’t care if it seems crazy:

I don’t even know what to make of the optimism I had planning all of that, which now seems somewhere between adorable and hopelessly naive, given what I now know about how 2020 has played out. Let me just summarize by saying this: sometime in June, I finally cried uncle, doubled the weekly drink limit, and lowered the target average of everything to 75% instead of 85%. This was (1) a reward for making it to June and still faithfully updating the spreadsheet and (2) an acknowledgment that this is a year that seemed designed to teach us we must bend.

All of this is a very long way of saying that I despite my unplanned hiatus I could still hit 85% with the blog posts. Because I’m a little too in-love with my spreadsheet, I have this nice little reference chart that shows me exactly how many days or weeks I can miss to hit 90%, 85%, 80%, or 75% respectively:

I can miss up to 8 weeks of blog posts and meet my original target, if not the full weekly intention, so I’m not going to beat myself up about it.

As I write this, the whole thing is making me laugh. And that is worth it, so I’ll aim to keep posting every(ish) week as planned.

How have you adjusted your expectations of yourself this year? Or how might you need to?