Avoiding New Year Resolutions, and succumbing to them

“What can’t be measured can’t be improved”, with this dictum in mind I set out, at the very beginning of the year, to maintain an electronic compendium of my daily activities. It wasn’t just another New Year resolution, of course. I have never fallen for that fad, and I never will. Stupid people fall for it, only to break it within the first month. Mine was a conviction, not a resolution. A promise to self, if you will. And if that sounds a lot like a resolution, you’re mistaken. You really are. I didn’t fall for that stupid fad for over 25 years, and I wasn't falling for it now. Unlike everyone else, I was going to keep this promise unbroken for the whole year.

It was a simple task - just an excel sheet to be updated every night with entries for the day’s sleeping and waking times, the sleep duration (difference of the sleeping and waking times), and daily fuck ups and achievements. I named it “Daily Dossier”. Below is a picture of it.

My aim behind keeping Daily Dossier was twofold – one, to monitor average sleeping hours daily; two, to move the entries in the daily fuck-ups column to the daily achievements column asap.

The first aim involved measuring average sleeping hours at night as well as during the afternoon. I am concerned with both of those because I sleep really late at night, and often yawn shamelessly during the afternoon, sometimes at work, with a violent shake of the head and a loud trailing sound from my uncovered mouth accompanying the yawn. When no one’s looking, I lift both my hands up and twist and turn them in more ways than a yogi could. Once my boss walked in on me while I was doing that. By measuring my sleeping hours, I would regulate them till I stop embarrassing myself and everyone else around me.

The second aim is self-explanatory. Like everyone else does, I procrastinate too. With the new regimen, I would keep track of my procrastinations and nip them in the bud. The point was to keep recording fuck-ups till they turned into achievements. This measure-to-improve thing was perfect. Woohoo!

So it began, on the very first day of 2017. I duly updated the sheet at the night of January 1, and felt ecstatic about my conscientiousness. I was keeping my promise. I wasn’t like them.

Then I forgot to update it the next two nights. But hey, I was genuinely busy. More importantly, I had not shared the excel sheet online to update it from anywhere. On the night of January 4, I made entries for the previous two nights from memory, and shared the sheet online. All set. No mishaps now.

A strange thing happened while I was making entries on the night of January 5. The fuck-ups column had just one entry till then, for January 2, and it was yet to be moved to the achievements column. So, I removed it. Yup, the right thing to do would have been to bring it to the achievements column, but I didn’t do that. Instead, I just made it disappear. But, it wasn’t the wrong thing to do either. One, it made my New Year look and feel better - no fuck-ups, only achievements. Two, it was a tiny fuck-up anyway. Correcting it wouldn’t have changed my life. Having said that, I was cautious of what I’d done, and I wasn’t going to let it happen again. As penance, I did make an entry in the fuck-ups column for something that happened on January 5, and resolved to shift it to the achievements column the very next day. So now there were two things to be wary of – missing making entries even a single night; messing with the fuck-ups column. 

The next time I was reminded of Daily Dossier was on January 10. It was impossible to make entries for 4 days from memory alone, so for the sleep duration, the average function in excel helped. How off the mark could it be, I thought to myself. I remembered there were 2 hours I’d spent in bed on the afternoon of January 8, but that was just a tiny lapse that didn’t need recording, so I skipped it. I also fleetingly thought that maybe I should enter all those days of missing making entries in the fuck-ups column, but then I didn’t. It wasn’t a fuck-up, just a slip-up. Moreover, I wasn’t going to repeat it. As for the fuck-up on January 5, I hadn’t yet remedied it, but I didn’t make any more entries for it after that date.

I am writing this post now because, through some divine intervention, Daily Dossier popped up on my screen today. The last entry is from January 10. My first thought was – Oh Shit, I must do something! But then it was just a lot of lulz-ing and rofl-ing. 

So yeah, this whole thing was actually just a stupid New Year resolution and went the way almost all such resolutions do. Damn, seems like I am indeed like them. Or maybe I am worse - what can be measured can be improved, but hey, why bother improving when it can simply be un-measured.