Happy New Year and welcome to another go-around!

2022 is set up to be a strange one. 2021 has mostly been that limbo where the world has neither been at its illest nor fully healed, only just chugging along mid-illness. We’ve felt this in our bones for 12 whole months. We want to get out. So we turn once again to the promise of a new year to bring full healing, and along with it, that New Year Bounce.

2022 is not alone in this regard, though. This is what we do with every new year, right? We enter with a basketful of wishes, cross our fingers and knock on wood. Then we give these wishes a name: resolutions.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not anti-New-Year-resolutions. If anything, the best New Year resolutions are well set up goals. But the yassification of these resolutions often leaves out the challenges involved in bridging the space between intent and achievement. In the throes of New Year Bounce, we get caught up in making promises to ourselves, only to realise down the road that things are not as they seem. This year, however, New Year Bounce is in shorter-than-usual supply, and we’re suddenly asking such crucial questions as: Is 2022 a year for traditional goal-setting? and What alternative approaches might we apply?

Well, I’ve decided on one such alternative approach for myself: lessons.

Sometime last year, I began this letter series on how to think about your approach to achieving writing (and other) goals. The first was Planning Meticulously, followed by Executing Immediately and Failing Swiftly. The last two, Learning Intentionally and Pivoting Tactfully, have the most capacity to be atraditional. It is that anti-traditionalism I’ve decided to tap into for 2022, by swapping resolutions for lessons.

“How to Author Like a Strategist, Part IV”: Learning with intention

My biggest lesson from 2021 is that I often bite much more than I can chew.

I started this five-part series mid-year, for instance, and still have still not finished it. Sure I made a resolution at the beginning of the year (Write more useful newsletter stuff!). Even had a plan and topics sketched out, which swiftly failed (not a bad thing). But bouncing back became more difficult because I’d packed my schedule too tightly (a bad thing). The half-completed newsletter series was one of the less worrisome symptoms of this creaking system. The others, like severe burnout and a dent in my mental health, were more worrisome.

Now, it might seem the solution is staring me in the face: stop taking on more work! But that leans close to the traditional concept of goals/resolutions: envisioning the “big picture” endgame (More free time!) and then reverse-engineering the steps to get there (Less work!). For 2022, I want to try an alternative approach: make a list of what failed, and overturn those particular failures with bitesize, manageable actions. For this, I will employ my trusty CSA framework.

Challenges, Solutions, Actions

The CSA framework is actually the revision tool I use for my writing: identify the challenges/problems (often from editorial notes or peer review), brainstorm solutions (more than one, and then choose the most effective), and the most important part: specify the actions needed to enact these solutions.

To apply this to my 2022 approach, I identified the gaps, flaws, errors and failures from last year that resulted in me taking on too much work. Here’s a non-exhaustive list:

• Worried about money (even when I shouldn’t have)

• Overestimating my abilities (2.5k words a day for a month? Lmao)

• Over-promising and over-committing, then chasing professional integrity at all costs

• The constant lure of the myth: “Once this is all completed, I’ll have free time”

• Etc.

I have begun to think of some solutions (though others may skip this step and immediately head into actions, which is cool too). Here’s one for each (there are multiple solutions for some):

• Worrying about money: Keep an updated cash flow spreadsheet. Being able to look at how earnings and expenses affect funds in hand can help me make better decisions about if I absolutely need to take on that new thing right now.

• Overestimating my abilities: Hire help. I’ve decided that life is a video game where you can either spend more money or spend more health—but only one of those is renewable. You can guess which is which. So, yeah, I’m upping my budget for outsourcing.

• Over-promising, over-committing: Practice saying no, verbally and in writing. (This one is particularly good for my day job). Arming myself with professional language for refusal allays my fear of blowback and prevents me from being caught off-guard. In time, it also increases my confidence in saying no.

• The myth of free time: Under-schedule work, over-schedule “free time.” “Free time” must be planned just like everything else. If not, kiss it goodbye.

Now, I get to specify the actions I’ll take to enact these. This is the best part because it often requires you to step out of your comfort zone and assess the exact work required for each solution and if it’s worth it. Here are mine:

• Spreadsheet: (1) Download template/set up sheet. (2) Decide on a monthly date + time (a range) for updates.

• Hire help: (1) Outline what I need help with & what I can afford. (2) Outsource the hiring (lmao, I cannot).

• Practice refusal: (1) Write out template statements, save them on my phone (2) When faced with a situation, read them out, verbatim if I have to. (3) Copy-and-paste for email.

• Under-schedule: (1) Block out “free” hours weekly. (2) Schedule typical activities within them, e.g. “housekeeping,” “reading,” “football,” “sleep,” etc. (3) Ensure free hours > work hours by 3:1. Scale down/refuse what over-extends (this will be tough!).

The best part about this approach is that you can start right now or you can take things slow and steady. For instance, some other challenges I listed, I have simply walked away from. Sometimes, sitting with the reality that these problems/challenges exist is enough. Especially at a time when we’re just too jaded to hop on the New Year Bounce and we may need some time to gather some steam. Do you, folks.

2022 is going to be a challenging year for making plans. Perhaps taking lessons from 2021 and simply walking into the new year with them might be just what you need. But whatever your approach, strap in and get ready to Pivot Tactfully—which, incidentally, is what I’ll be talking about in my next letter, and the final in this series!