New Year’s Resolution Review

It’s been two months into the first year of the new decade. January and February have passed and have been filled with many lessons for me personally. I think now is a good time to stop and review the progress that’s been made.

In another post I made a list of my resolutions for 2010 [1]. This is because I promised myself that I would be prolific. Most of the projects in that list are writing projects (content that I post on various blogs), and one main year-long project which is to write and release 26 songs in 52 weeks [2].

So far the results have been satisfactory, although there have been some days where I inevitably miss a schedule due to shortage of time and energy. I thought at first that I’m spreading myself too thin, and the quality suffers. But then I remember: the point of the resolution was to be prolific, I didn’t mention anything about quality.

The first thing that goes

In the months before 2010 (and in the months before I started writing in this blog), I was mainly a content consumer. I would spend my mornings reading every single post in my RSS feed [3]. It would take me up to two hours just two devour 20-30 posts, which I think is quite a long time compared to the speed I read now.

I feel that the months I spent merely consuming content was a necessary period – the period where I let all ideas come in and let them sediment inside my mind. Now, I’m regurgitating and remixing those ideas and adding my own perspective to them – which leads to the blueprint material for the thoughts I write in this blog.

I have to admit though, by taking on multiple writing projects – and being a content creator myself – the first thing that suffers is my RSS feed. Usually I would only have 20-30 unread posts at any one time, but today I could reach 200-300 unread posts! My perfectionist side would shiver at the thought of abandoning these subscriptions, but I also said to myself that I would embrace imperfection [4] and just let it slide.

The year of prolificiency

Between the songwriting project, the happiness project, and the dream journal project, I’m also thinking about starting new writing projects to promote my music through the Blue Summer brand. The prospect alarms me slightly, because I fear that there will simply be not enough time to write them all. Besides quality, consistency of content could also suffer (and it already has more than a few times).

But in the spirit of prolificiency (I just made that word up), I’m going to just do it. I’ve spent enough time aiming for perfection – this time I’m just going to aim for action. This time, I’m going to achieve results.

So join me, ye fellow songwriters, musicians, authors, entrepreneurs (and any other class of profession that reads this blog)! Two months have already passed, and we will have a great ten more months to this year. How will you shape and fill this time in your life, with the dreams and the values that you want to create?

This is your story. Better make it a good one.

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[1] For a Happy and Productive 2010, 2009
[2] 26 Songs in 52 Weeks. Today’s release is #4/26
[3] How to Use RSS, 2010
[4] It Doesn’t Matter Where You Start, 2009