Resolutions for a New Age

Resolutions are funny things. For most people, resolutions are made in December, broken in January, forgotten in February.

The prospect of changing a habit for an entire year is not one that I find encouraging. That's a long time. And what if you fail at your resolution? Will you have to wait until next year to set another?

That's the way lots of folks do it. But that's not how it has to be. I have had great success in my own life with setting resolutions at a more manageable level. Specifically, I set one resolution (at least) each month. Here's why.

A monthly resolution seems easier to keep. Its short time frame tricks the brain into underrating the difficulty of the resolution, raising confidence. This may sound like a cheap trick to play on your own brain, but it works for me.

A month comes along a lot more often than a year. At a rate of one per month, you can fully accomplish twelve resolutions in one year. On the other hand, doing twelve annual resolutions starting in January is probably biting off a bit more than you can chew.

A new month is never more than five weeks away. By this I mean that if you utterly fail in your lofty goal, that's okay---at least you don't have to wait until next year to start again. Also, if the going gets tough around day fifteen, you can often convince yourself to keep going because you're already halfway done.

A month is long enough to develop a lasting habit. A large number of my own monthly resolutions have stuck around for good. According to some people, twenty-one days are required to formulate a habit, and you're giving yourself around thirty. In my experience, that's enough time for habit setting, even giving you a few days' padding at the beginning to get things rolling. (I often find that my resolutions are hardest at the beginning of the month.)

Some projects may be too long for a month. But instead of setting up another New Year's Eve goal, try breaking it up into month-long components. If you're trying to lose weight this year, set individual monthly resolutions for things like exercising, mindful eating, and drinking water.

Setting monthly resolutions will get you all the benefits of yearly resolutions without the headache.

Finding Places II: More criteria

Finding a place for everything is important, as explained earlier. Here are some more considerations for choosing places:

Does it have a reason to be there? Storing a hammer in your sock drawer is a surefire way to lose the hammer. Either (a) you'll forget that it is in the sock drawer, or (b) after using it, you won't think returning it to the sock drawer is very important. Either way, it's now lost. (Of course, if you often use a hammer near your sock drawer (creative toenail clipping?), this might work just fine. Just make sure it has a reason for being there.)

By contrast, putting a hammer in a toolbox signals clearly where things are, and where they go when you're done with them.

Do frequently used items get first pick? When deciding where things should go, it's often helpful to define primary and secondary storage. For example, the kitchen has always been a bit of a space crunch for us—we always seem to have more things than space in which to put them. Our solution so far has been to choose those items we use the most (the blender, for example) and give them priority placement. We successively choose the most important things and find places in the kitchen for them, until things start to edge towards "a little cramped". Then we take everything that didn't make the cut and move it all out to secondary storage—in our case, the hall closet. We love that all the essentials fit comfortably in our kitchen, and we don't mind having the roasting pan a short walk away from the kitchen—we just don't use it that often.

Finding a place is only the first part of the equation, but it is the hardest for most folks, and sets a foundation for maintaining order.

Actual Wages -- Backwards

You might already have figured your actual wages, using both your actual time (work plus time you spend on work) and your actual pay (not including taxes, and subtracting expenses you wouldn't have without your job, including indirect expenses like vacations and "costuming").

But here's a twist: try it for your hobbies.

Take your favorite recreational activity and evaluate both the actual time you spend on it and the actual cost. Try to consider all the indirect costs of time and money, too.

Let's examine an example: video gaming. Suppose that every month or so, our gamer spends fifty dollars on a new game. Let's also suppose that she plays it every day for an hour, or about thirty hours per game. Simply take the dollar amount of total dollars spent over total time spent in hours, and you'll get $1.67/hr, something roughly comparable to an hourly wage. (At least, it has the same units, if not the same semantics.)

Or try another one: watching television. Suppose you watch three hours per day of television, or about ninety hours per month. And suppose that you have a thirty-dollar cable susbcription. This works out to a tentative cost of $.33/hr.

However, there might be more to this. For many of us, watching television and its associated advertisements leads us directly to additional spending. If in watching television, you are induced to spend a hundred dollars each month that you wouldn't have otherwise spend—this is not an unreasonable assumption—your actual cost suddenly jumps to $4.30/hr.

The point of figuring out the actual cost of hobbies is not primarily to choose between options. Your hobbies should be dictated by what you love, by your passions, not by choosing the cheapest one out there. Instead, use this information as an incentive to make better use of your hobbies.

To make a hobby more cost-effective, you really have two ways to handle it—either spend more time on it, or spend less money on it.

What Do You See?

One particularly difficult aspect of being colorblind is explaining it to others. Though not incredibly uncommon, colorblindness occurs rarely enough that when most people learn of my colorblindness, they express curiosity. Common responses include, "So what does red look like to you?" and "What color is this?"

My experience with colorblindness differs from what most people imagine. I don't have problems telling whether the stoplight is lit red or green. Nor am I vexed by not knowing automatically the color of each object I see. After twenty-some-odd years, one adapts to these things.

I do have difficulty with certain situations. I simply cannot distinguish ripe bananas from green ones, at least not without touching them. I also do not fully grasp the nuances of color that accompany items like my pair of "green bordering on grey" khaki pants—whether they appear to others as green or grey seems to depend on my shirt, my shoes, even my mood.

Sometimes I have trouble with my own gadgets. Recently, I used a cheap battery charger that had only one light as an indication of status, changing from yellow to orange when the battery had finished charging. It thus earned a well-deserved colorblind-friendliness rating of zero. (A better design that probably doesn't cost much more is to have a single light blink during charging, then go solid once it's done.)

Being colorblind isn't easy on one's spouse, either. From sorting socks to identifying which ties go with which pants, my wife is a saint indeed. When the bananas are looking ripe (at least they might be), or the battery charger is done (maybe), I need backup, and she is the first person I turn to.

Colorblindness has its pleasant side effects, too. For example, how many people do you know who can ingest green ketchup without a second glance? How about blue milk? I count these among my many talents. In fact, being colorblind has made me a lot less attentive to color in general. (A few hundred years ago, I suppose that this "talent" caused the deaths of plenty of people who ate the wrong root because of inattention to a color difference. Today, though, that doesn't seem to be much of a problem.)

Wheel of Color

In World War II, when airplanes flew bombing runs over camouflaged Nazi camps, the pilots were faced with a problem---they couldn't see the enemy. The camps were camouflaged well enough to be nearly invisible. Technology wasn't available to solve the problem---while heat-sensing goggles would surely have been nice, they were hardly available. So who came to the rescue?

Color blind people.

Before I explain, let me point out one thing you might not know about color blind folk: they are often not totally insensitive to color---they are really color "different". Many color blind people, myself included, have all the sensors needed to detect color (red, green, and blue), but the wavelengths of some of these sensors are different than normal. For example, my red sensors are geared more towards orange.

By the same token, light is not necessarily defined in terms of red, green, and blue---it is a continuous spectrum. In computer monitors, we use red, green, and blue to simulate all the colors of the rainbow, but that is only because we sense the world through those three particular wavelengths. A true orange color stimulates both green and red cones, so a computer can imitate a true orange with varying degrees of the component colors. But real-world pigments and colors are more complex than can be shown through a computer screen.

With that, let's go back to World War II. When the Germans chose colors for their camouflage, they evaluated the color scheme with their "normal" eyes, choosing the colors that hit their eyes' light sensors the same way the landscape would. Seen at a distance against a dark forest, such camouflage should be invisible. But since color blindness is a difference in light sensor wavelengths, the camouflage colors would not necessarily strike the eyes of color blind soldiers quite the same. Additionally, people who are color blind often focus more on texture than on color. This discovery gave the Allies a valuable weapon in the war against Nazi Germany.

Maybe that's why there are color blind people around still.

Finding Places

In the organizing world, there's a saying: "A place for everything, and everything in its place." At first glance, it seems trite. But believe me, it has changed lives. Mine, at least.

The first part of the phrase is the more important of the two, the foundation. "A place for everything." What does that mean?

Having sufficient storage space is not enough. Just because all your stuff can fit in your house, or in your closet, or in your storage unit, does not mean that it has a place, at least not in any sense worth mentioning. No, each item of stuff has to have a specific place. But, you may ask, if everything fits in your house somewhere, doesn't it already have a specific place? Well, technically, yes. But some things make one place better than another. Here are a few of the criteria I've used in trying to find a place for everything.

Is it stored near where it is used? Obviously, it is preferable for cooking utensils to be in the kitchen. This makes it easier to get what you need when you need it—storing the remote controls by where you watch television makes life a little less frustrating. It may also help you remember things you might otherwise forget—having safety goggles stored right by your table saw will make it more likely that you'll use them.

Incidentally, what if you use one thing in two different places? For example, we use scissors at our information center for processing mail, but we also use scissors for creating cards, which we generally do in the living room. Our solution? Buy an extra pair to go with the decorative paper. Having only one place where each item can go helps us find scissors without having to check various "hangouts" each time.

There's a lot more to this to say, but this is a good starting point. With a place for everything, you know where to find it!

Oldies but Goodies

"Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without."

I have a lot of old things. From a twenty-year-old car to a five-year-old (non-smartphone) PDA, a sizeable majority of my possessions have been around for a while.

I like my old things. Our little sedan is fairly reliable, and it is up to almost any task we have put to it—on one occasion, we even managed to transport a bookcase in it! My trusty PDA seems to be going strong after all this time, and I know it backward and forward. Like an old pair of shoes, these things fit me comfortably.

Keeping old things around takes some work. It's not all peaches and cream—maintenance, repair and stewardship are all part of holding on to old things. I've had to buy new bits and pieces for my PDA on occasion, and our car sometimes needs repairs that are pretty expensive. At times like these, it's tempting to give up and replace something with its new counterpart.

But keeping old things around is usually cheaper than buying new things. Fixing that old car may cost a couple thousand dollars, but that's less money than you're likely to lose to depreciation during just the first month of owning a new car. Suddenly a new car doesn't seem like such a bargain.

Buying new is a slippery slope. If you're buying for the thrill of having something new and shiny, how much time will pass before you no longer feel the thrill from what you've bought? Until your gadget gets scratched? Until the next year's model comes out? That "new car smell" will fade long before the car does—are you going to devote thousands of dollars to chasing a smell?

Old stuff may not have the glitziness of new, shiny things, but keeping older things gives me more money for other, more important things.