I’ve spent the past few weeks reflecting on 2020. Not the bazillion horrific things that were in the headlines, but on my goals, my accomplishments, and what I’d like to change about my process. I’ve always prided myself on sticking to my goals despite whatever life brings my way, but 2020 threw me for a loop.

I’ve heard it said that people with high-functioning anxiety—like myself—did really well the first few months of the pandemic and shelter-at-home orders, but by the end of the summer, it all caught up to me (which I discussed a bit in my last post.) While a lot of it can be blamed on the constant, low-level stress that’s been a part of all of our lives, quite a bit of it is because of bad habits I’ve allowed myself to fall into. I know we’re supposed to be cutting ourselves some slack during all this, but we don’t know how much longer our lives will be in this altered state and I feel like my options are to either keep floundering or adjust to this new normal.

A side story: I married my first husband in at the end of August 2006, and at the end of December that year, we packed our belongings and moved to Mexico. (This is a SUPER condensed version of this story. Message me if you’d like to know more.) At the beginning of 2007, we started the process to get him back in the US (again, long story), and for 2+ years we waited for an answer. During those 30 months, it often felt like my life was on hold. That someone had pressed pause and once we had an answer, our lives would go back to “normal.” That in-between period felt like a bump in our path, something that knocked us off course but would eventually be nothing more than a weird time we’d look back on with a mixture of fondness and dread.

Sound familiar?

Around the two year mark, it struck me that while we’d spent four months as a married couple in Chicago, we’d been in Mexico for over two years. MEXICO WAS OUR LIFE. My mental health was taking a beating and I realized that if I wanted to get through our time there alive, I needed to adjust my outlook and embrace this new reality. Because as much as I didn’t want it to be, that WAS our reality. The idea that something different was on the horizon was still true, but we would never go back to our previous lives.

I feel like I’m at a similar precipice now. Yes, the vaccines are rolling out and we’ll hopefully get this pandemic under control, but there are no guarantees that life will go back exactly as it was before. Continuing to wait for that day feels like it’s doing more damage than good. Sure, I’ll still cut myself some slack on bad days, but if I want to maintain my big goals (like publishing one book per year), I need to stay focused.

To be focused means to concentrate; to direct one’s attention or efforts.

That’s part of my intention, but it’s bigger than that. To stay focused on my goals, I need to make small shifts in my daily routine. Essentially I need to:

• go to bed earlier, so I can wake up earlier, so I have a full hour to write every morning
• put my phone out of reach so I can concentrate more fully on tasks
• set time limits on how long I play games on my phone

Separately, these are simple changes, but they will make a big impact on my daily routine. I often go to bed frustrated that I didn’t accomplish as much as I hoped, then I play games for half an hour to distract myself instead of SLEEPING and repeat the cycle. I’m not calling these resolutions because you all know how I feel about those, but I am resolving to focus on my goals and all the little things that make them possible.

Do you have a word for the year? I’d love to hear it in the comments!