From Writer Unboxed:
A few days before the Solstice, against my better instincts, I opened an Instagram advertisement for a Planner. I couldn’t resist. The ad promised Productivity. Wellness. With this Planner I would achieve not just my goals, but my dreams. 2024 would be my best year ever.
I am a list-maker by nature; I have a day job that is governed by reports, meetings, and deadlines and I live or die by my daily office planner and a stack of yellow legal pads to track my goings-on. Other than the shared office Google calendar, I don’t digitalize my planning. The act of recording a task or an appointment by hand makes a deeper connection with my brain: I feel it as much as I see it.
But this Planner promised next-level empowerment, and for a moment I lingered on the website, wondering if it could be true.
Suddenly, my IG feed was nothing but advertisements for Planners. Gorgeous things, some the size of an atlas, others made to nestle as neatly in the palm as the ubiquitous smartphone. Some leather, others cloth-bound and embossed, like a Penguin Classic, begging to be opened, their creamy pages caressed. Some were filled with motivational quotes or creativity invoking prompts. Others had a Dashboard that would keep me on track or a Workflow System to chart my progress and hold me accountable (How? I marveled. A Planner with a built-in guilt genie, tsk-tsking when I drank a second glass of wine on a weeknight or blew off a Saturday morning of writing to finish the latest Ruth Ware novel?).
What is it about these Planners that is so irresistible? Why did I find myself, overcome by Agenda-Envy, googling “Best Planners 2024”? Yes, there is the allure of fresh starts. The intoxication of untouched pages and untapped pens that goes all the way back to grade school with the perfume of newly sharpened pencils and the smooth glide of Pee-Chee covers unmarred by doodling.
As I plunged down the Planner rabbit hole, I realized my search wasn’t about finding the perfect tool to organize my routines. What these physical objects represent—whatever their degree of bells and whistles—is greater than all the promises they make to optimize our lives. It is what we already carry within us: intentionality.
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines intentionality as:
“the mind’s capacity to direct itself on things. Mental states like thoughts, beliefs, desires, hopes exhibit intentionality in the sense that they are always directed on, or at, something: if you hope, believe or desire, you must hope, believe or desire something.” *
I think of it as how and where I direct my time and energy to achieve deeply desired goals.
With the recognition of a desire for intentionality came a poignant reflection. Although my day-job life is well-structured and my inner creature of routine regularly trundles her outer self to the pool and the yoga studio, I haven’t given the same attention to my creative life.
Once upon a time I had and that intentionality—the deliberate, directed focus of time and energy—resulted in a writing career that was both inwardly fulfilling and on a public upward trajectory: In a short span of time, I’d landed an agent and took two novels to publication.
That trajectory was interrupted by divorce and its attendant financial distress: I left the full-time writing career that I’d launched only three years before to return to a traditional 9-5 with its steady paychecks and health benefits. Naturally my writing career had to adjust to the sudden change of priorities; however, my expectations didn’t get the memo. I kept up the internal pressure to produce and publish until that pressure became a painful bruise of self-recrimination and its partner, self-doubt.
I restarted my traditional work life, first in the wine industry I had most recently left, then in non-profit administration that had been my earlier professional calling. I stumbled from a bad relationship and into lasting love. Like all of us, I lurched through the pandemic years, with the unexpected grace of finding myself a homeowner again in the opening days of the lockdowns. I was breathlessly busy and distracted.
I kept writing, the thing that gave me a sense of self during a time of massive personal change. But in the five years it took me to write my next novel, I’d let my intentionality as a writer fizzle and flatten.
I can fill the spare moments I have as a writer with words, a what that distracts me from the greater why. But in a writing career that has flowed and ebbed these past several years, I had lost touch with what brought me to the page in the first place. It wasn’t until this past fall, seven years after my divorce and seven-a-half years after the publication of my first novel, that I stepped back to deeply examine my thoughts and hopes about my writing life.
Late September, I stood in front of a group of eight writers on the first day of a novel-writing course and proclaimed that in our time together—90 minutes over eight Wednesdays—our focus would be on writing, not publishing. We would free our expectations of the external possibilities of our work and instead lean into the challenge and joy of crafting a great story. A principle I, their instructor, had lost touch with some time before.
We’re culturally imprinted to focus our fresh-start energy on January 1. The pool lanes where I swim laps ripple with new bodies the first weeks of the year. Dry January has become a thing. My Substack feed is replete with newsletters about resolutions and renewal. It tracks, of course. We end the year saturated with celebration, decoration, libation. The stark, cold, reality of January (for those in the Northern hemisphere) makes for a natural transition to discipline. But when in the busy several weeks that precede the start of the new year do we really have the time and energy to be deliberate about our hopes, goals, intentions for our creative lives?
I would like to invite in a new New Year practice for my writing, and for yours: Let’s make the month of January our time to actively reflect on our writing goals and intentions.
Link to the rest at Writer Unboxed