Jackson Bates

Intention

A couple of years ago I was having my first 1:1 for the year with one of my team members and he mentioned how every year he picks a 'word for the year' to frame his thinking about how he wants to approach the year ahead.

I really liked this because it requires some real reflection in order to be meaningful, and it has more sticking power than a New Year's resolution. So I've been doing the same ever since.

Around this time last year I had was reading 4000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, and was already primed to be thinking about how I was using my time and balancing FOMO with JOMO (Joy of Missing Out).

After some thought, I settled on the word "Intention".

Now that the work year is coming to an end, I wanted to reflect back on the year through the frame of intention, and how I interpreted it in different aspects of my life and work.

Protecting my head space #

Between work and family duties I was finding it hard to balance my energy levels and still finding time for my own interests and creativity.

One of the things I committed to early on was fighting the urge to fall into hustle culture traps where every idea that popped into my head had to be validated and chewed on as a potential product or side business. Even though I have very rarely actually followed one of these impulses to fruition, I did spend a lot of time and mental energy in the past on these sorts of projects.

The strategy I used was that I was allowed to commit to one personal project at a time to take up the mental space for that kind of thinking, and if I wanted to explore something else instead, I'd intentionally shelve the other idea. This meant giving myself permission to move on from things, and also get better at saying 'no' to myself when less compelling ideas started vying for attention.

This actually had a nice impact on my family activities in particular, since I had less noise in my mind in general and it helped my be more present in the day to day stuff.

I did actually end up executing on a few ideas - mostly personal projects and apps that met needs I had. A big intentional choice here was that I could easily draw a boundary between thing I intend to use myself vs the intention to build a product and find customers etc. The closest thing I have to an actual shippable product, a rock climbing and off the wall training logging app, is fully functional and wonderful - and deciding early it was just for me meant I didn't have to let things like business plans distract me from achieving what I actually set out to achieve.

Things I didn't do, which all presented themselves as good ideas at various points throughout the year:

Not doing those things allowed me the space to:

Protecting my time #

At the risk of coming across like a productivity guru, I have found demarcating times on my calendar - mostly at work - to be very helpful in stopping me from juggling to many things and getting fried.

I've put many more systems and rituals in place to get me to use my time intentionally. It helps me decide ahead of time how I'm intending to spend the time, and then stay focused when I'm in a particular planned window.

I've also become much more strict with myself about lunchtime. Occasionally work bleeds into it, just because that's sometimes unavoidable. For the most part though, I've kept to a decent 45-60 minute lunch break and tried to take the time to eat well or rest intentionally.

Miscellany #

The idea of intention has crept into many other nooks and crannies in my life. For one, I've noticed it become a recurring character in my vocabulary! I find myself talking about or asking about others' intentions to understand what matters to them and what they are actually aiming for in our interactions (or their actions).

I've also found that when I find myself in a social situation I am quick to assess my own social battery and set my intention to myself more explicitly about what I'm committing to. For example, in the past if I have been very low energy, I spend no small amount of time and anxiety thinking about the ways I'm failing in a particular encounter. With an intention framing, I'm more likely to notice how I'm faring in a social setting and set my own expectations accordingly. It means that I decide early whether I'm trying to protect my energy and that's ok, or am I happy to be more engaged.

Next year... #

Grow.

I don't know exactly how that will manifest just yet, but we'll see.