This year, 2020, feels different to me. Last year, I was organized and disciplined about the way I approached my annual goals. I planned in December 2018, and I hit the ground running. I had two goals for each quarter of the year, and I made significant progress on almost all of them.

This year, I’m not making any specific outcome goals. I’m focused on systems and processes. My aim is to develop better habits and to trust the outcomes to take care of themselves. But it’s not just the type of goals that have changed. It’s my attitude of easing into these goals with self-kindness, self-awareness, and self-forgiveness.

I have a colleague at work who does astrological charts as a hobby. He told me that Jupiter, the planet of expansiveness and potential, will be in Capricorn, my sun sign, for the whole year. That resonates with my theme for 2020 of developing my potential.

I’m reading James Clear’s book Atomic Habits. So far, I haven’t learned anything I didn’t already know from reading Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit or from Wendy Wood’s Good Habits, Bad Habits. Or from observing my patients when they are in recovery from addiction.

But I keep reading in the hope I will find a new key to unlock the magic of doing things daily. One concept covered in all these books is the idea of redesigning the environment to decrease friction for good habits and to increase friction for bad habits.

Environmental design can also set a context that is associated with the habit. One location for each purpose. Perhaps that rocking chair in my living room can be my designated writing place.

Don’t Break the Chain

So far, I haven’t done well at checking things off on my habit tracker, and I’m okay with that. My goal is that by the end of the year, I will have figured out how to be doing these things daily: meditate, write, do yoga, exercise, read.

The benefits: calm, pages toward my memoir, flexibility and balance, strength, and knowledge. These benefits will accrue without being specific goals, but they’re all consistent with my identity, with my understanding of who I am.