2025: Year of Weigh Anchor

12 Feb, 2025

Instead of a New Year's Resolution, I assign each calendar year a "Yearly Theme".¹ Around the new year, I decided that 2025 shall be the "Year of Weigh Anchor". In a sentence, my goal for this year is:

If I'm anxious about something I'm avoiding, I should do that thing as soon as feasible.

In fact, I've become aware of some chores I'm procrastinating on by writing this. I will continue once they're done!

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aaaaaand I'm back! That only took (checks watch) 3 weeks! What was I talking about again?

Yearly Themes

Unlike a New Year's resolution, a yearly theme doesn't have a failure condition. Themes tend to be adaptable to new and unexpected situations, as well as to shifts in my own perspective. The goal for any given theme is that, by the end of the year, the theme feels embedded in the way I think and go about the world.

Year of Weigh Anchor

As I mentioned in my last post:

I tend to be an avoidant person. If something is stressing me out, my gut reaction will be to distract myself with some other bright shiny thing. At times, this leads me to procrastinate on tackling important things in my life.

What I've found, consistently, is that sitting down and doing the thing I've been avoiding isn't nearly as hard or as stressful as I had built it up to be. And then after I've done the thing, the weight is lifted off my shoulders.

The idea with this yearly theme is: what if I just did the thing as soon as possible? If I hoist up this anchor and get the ship moving?² I picture this applying in various facets in my life. At work, I sometimes avoid more tedious or stressful tasks. I typically have multiple personal chores that I'm "behind" on at any given moment. And it's easy in personal relationships to avoid the potential discomfort of deeper conversations.

The Year So Far

I've been living in this yearly theme for a month and a half now, and ooooh boy have I been weighing some anchor! I don't think any past yearly theme has led to this much insight on the subject matter, and it's only February! Here are a few things I've found already:

I Like Writing!

This blog only exists because of this yearly theme. I started reading a number of tech and tech-adjacent blogs last year, and I had a feeling of "wouldn't it be neat if I did something like that".³

Then, about a month ago, I realized that I could just do it! So I spun up this blog, and a few times now, I've actually sat down and written something (either because I wanted to, or because it felt like I was avoiding writing, and you know what that means!)

I've found that writing, in a somewhat polished style (as opposed to personal notes), forces me to get my thoughts properly arranged on a given topic. And this is then a great tool for actually engaging with a given topic if I would otherwise want to continue avoiding it.

Prioritization

Another thing I've learned is that prioritization is hard. Okay, fine, I already knew that, but for some reason I wasn't expecting it to immediately be so important to this theme.

I've been more vigilant, trying to notice when I'm anxiously avoiding something, and it turns out I'm almost always a little bit anxious about something or other. There's simply not enough time to do all the things, so at some point, this becomes a problem of prioritization, which opens a whole other can of worms!⁴

Conclusion

I'm excited to see how the rest of this year goes. If I'm still doing this blog at the end of the year, I'll probably do a retrospective on the theme then.

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