2022 is here

Property of Stormberry

A new year has arrived, like so many others before it, and again we see the same things around us. There's the people bitching about how "it's just another day, like any other, nothing special about it", and then also the people giving advise about making New Year Resolutions, or not making New Year Resolutions, and then the lots of people making all sorts of old jokes, and those who take this moment to remember things that happened. In general, people either try to share the experience with others or just try to get attention for whatever means.

The New Year means for me lots of planning. I spent the last days of 2021 preparing my calendars and planners for the new year, penciling in birthdays, appointments, Pagan Sabbaths, Roman Celebrations (those related to my Gods), and so on. I managed all of my calendars and planners (only five in total), but I still had the digital stuff to take care of. For years I have been using an Excel sheet to track my finances - mostly my spending - and each year I tweek it a little bit, to improve the system I use, in order to make sure it ends up working better and better for my purposes. It's not a perfect system yet, but each time I adjust it, it gets better.

In this particular case I'm quite proud because though I've been using this tracker since 2013, last year was the first year I actually followed it quite regularly. 2020 was the second year I filled the whole year, I believe, and with less backlog than in previous years. This year I will try to record more than just my expenses, and I'm still thinking about how to make a dynamic Budget Tracker, where I can check effectively which of my planned expenses have I completed and when. My idea is to make an easy tracker where I can keep track of which bills I've paid and which are still to be paid.

Property of Stormberry

Last year, for several months, I kept a cycle tracker, where I recorded my weight, body fat, water, muscle weight and bone weight daily based on my menstrual cycle and the Moon cycles. Eventually this tracker was making me anxious and turned out to be counterproductive for my health, so I stopped. In this same line I took out of my planner more than six different trackers for water, food habits, exercise, journaling, blogging... and something else. These I just couldn't really follow. I have used these trackers for years, since I was using the bullet journal system, but I never really used the infomation for anything. No matter how I grouped it or what I tried, it just wasn't adding any value to my life.

I celebrate the New Year, not only because I like celebrating things (I'm a Witch and I choose to celebrate the eight Sabbaths because, hey! they are celebrations!), but New Years mark a defined point in time to make a review of the last period, what has worked, what hasn't, and so I can keep on improving. Sure, the New Year is "just another day", but it's a day globally chosen to mark a given period. A year is a convenient chunk of time to have tried something, and to review the results of it. Using it is also convenient, because this day we start also new calendars, which is mostly important for those of us who still use paper planners, but also because many legal, fiscal and financial programs and paperwork - to call it somehow - finish a cycle on this date.

This is not the case for everybody, but it is the case for me. Is it your case? Be it as it may, it's good to have a moment, a marker of period for you to evaluate and review your progress in time, to decide what works, what doesn't, what can be adjusted, improved, and what needs to go.