With the start of a new year, I take the time to set my focus for the coming year. I believe that by being selective about where I direct my energy, I can achieve results that are exponentially greater than if I split that energy across many different goals.

I detailed my 2018 focus here (read that first if you want more context). Here is how I’m progressing.

2018 Theme: First Principles Lifestyle

This theme fits nicely with the goal I had set for the second half of my sabbath year (Jan-July) – evaluating the options for our life. This was by design. As such we have put a lot of energy into the theme outside of the specific named challenge, habit and exemplar. This means that I’ve done less with those than I would have wanted, but still stayed on theme.

To touch on three items from the theme.

1. Earlier in the year I made a really difficult decision between two jobs that presented very different lifestyles. Doing that forced me to think hard about what I valued, to ask my wife to do the same and for us to make a decision together. This was a fruitful exercise because beyond helping with this one decision, it helped direct our focus away from a whole swath of things that are similar or even farther in a direction we don’t wish to be heading.
2. On top of the above decision, we’ve been spending a lot of time evaluating neighborhoods. Over the course of our marriage we’ve lived in the middle of the most expensive city in America, in the city-suburb of another, in a small town and now we are in what is best described as a bedroom community. We’ve learned to love things about all of those but unfortunately our favorite parts are often in direct conflict – we love the outside space on the farm, but it is 10 miles to the nearest store, good luck not having a car. By spending a few hours at a time in various neighborhoods, looking at them with a critical eye, we feel we’re narrowing in on the features of a place where we can thrive.
3. How I earn an income and how we structure our days has been an item I’ve been thinking a lot about. I’ve held an ideal in my head for a while of running a business that my whole family could be involved in. The right type of business could get the kids involved, which would teach them hard work, give them real world context a classroom can’t, give us flexibility, allow us to be together more and leave our family with an asset that was as valuable as we made it. The trouble is, our family might not be a great fit for that kind of model. Our kids are all really young and on the wild side, I can’t really focus when they are around and my potential earnings are simply higher in certain jobs than they could be in any sort of family business. Going back to work recently has helped me realize this. While this feels like it closes some doors, perhaps it is just temporarily.

Now for the named items.

2018 Challenge: Profile 12 Families (w/ Kids) Living Intentionally Different

I haven’t done very much at all on my challenge for the year yet. I brainstormed about a dozen different types of families I’d be interested in speaking to; a car-free family, a nomadic family, etc. and for a few of them I put some names down. I’ve yet to contact anyone, start interviewing, write the profiles or figure out where I will host them. I am behind the ball on this one.

2018 Habit: Daily Devotions

The habit item of my yearly focus used to be the one I was most likely to fall short on. Last year I changed the way I did things and the results have continued to be very effective.

For the first quarter of the year, I needed to have completed three devotion times per week for it to have been a success. This was the case for 9 of the 13 weeks. A pretty decent start.

Of note, on no week did I complete more than 3, meaning things will get more difficult in the second quarter of the year when it will take four devotion times per week to be counted a success.

To highlight my procrastination, here is a chart showing the days of the week and how many times I had a devotion time on each. Friday is usually the day I realize I have zero for the week and need to hit all three remaining days in order for the week to count. You might notice, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday are a bit lower than the days next to them – those are usually the days I run and so am more time crunched.

One thing I noticed is a clear tension in timing of the ideal time for the impact and the ideal time for my schedule. I much prefer the impact of doing devotion time in the morning – it starts my day off better and my mind is not yet full of the days worries so I can really focus. The trouble is that if I don’t wake up early, I will get interrupted by rising children before I am finished. On the flip side, doing devotion time at night works really well with my schedule. It is a good way to calm down before going to sleep and I rarely get interrupted. Balancing these two factors is something I want to keep an eye on in the coming year, so I am going to start recording am/pm instead of just an ‘x’ on my tracker.

2018 Exemplar: John Muir

I have yet to do much here. A library book search turned up some great collections of Muir’s essays, and autobiography and even an illustrated kids book. I read the latter to my boys one night and put a bookmark into the former. I will need to do more in the coming months. I do have a camping trip to a national park planned as well as a run that passes through Muir Woods.