Another post about systems v. goals

A lot of my friends have been talking about the idea of systems v. goals for New Year's resolutions.
An example:

  "I want to walk 20 minutes every morning" is a system.
  "I want to lose 10 pounds" is a goal.

So here's a short list of things I want to do in the new year:

Say yes to more things

I always feel like I spend way too much time hanging out by myself, playing video games, reading and watching Netflix, and I want to spend more time with my girlfriend, my friends and my family. I actually make this goal every year, and I feel like I made great progress in 2013. What can I do here? When someone asks if I want to do something, say "Nah, I'm just gonna stay home and play video games" less often. The trick is being aware of this thing.

Write more 

I have a tumblr but I don't like tumblr. I get distracted by the cat gifs the people I follow repost, and it really seems more like a medium for reposting original content from people you don't know, rather than publishing your own original content. I just want a simple, dumb thing to write down ideas, so here's my ten thousandth blog or whatever. I'm thinking about a thing where I just write something in it every day, but that already sounds like a high bar to clear.

Get back into photography

There was a time I spent every spare dollar I had on photography equipment, and while something tells me that time has passed forever, I still want to get back into shooting photography. I built a shitty whitebox a while back to make it easier to take photos of Lego stuff for Instagram, but it hasn't quite scratched that itch. To start with, I'm thinking of going back through all my old notes for photo projects I never started, or abandoned, and picking one for the year.

Be smarter with my money

This mostly means a couple of things: paying down debt faster, and doing more research before I buy anything. I have a tendency to just buy the most highly rated thing on Amazon, and while that works out pretty well most of the time, I have a nagging suspicion I could be doing more here. I don't want to waste hundreds of hours to decide on a $50 purchase, but I have an idea I could waste less money by taking a bit more time.

I think I've already got some good ideas for systems here, but staying motivated on personal projects is a continual problem for me. To-do lists work pretty well for me, but eventually I lose motivations, and even my most effective systems fall to pieces. I like the idea of productivity apps, but I haven't found one that works well for me. Ideally, I'd have something like this:

The idea being you create a task, set a time for it to repeat (every day, every week) and the app will give you progressively more shit until you mark that task as completed for the time period.

Maybe something like this already exists, but I'm not sure there's much of a market for productivity apps that call you a shitbird when you forget to do things.

Anyway, I'm a couple days late, but whatever. Happy New Year!