How One Little Word Will Guide My 2011

I will readily admit that I am not good at New Year Resolutions.  I always start out with a bang and fizzle in no short order as my work week rapidly expands to 50+ hours through mid-April.  By that time, I'm tired and have long forgotten what I wanted to do on January 1st.

I have been very intrigued by scrapbook blogger Ali Edward's One Little Word concept and how it guides so many people through their new year.  Once I started thinking about this concept, I realized that this is actually something that might work for me.  It's not a Resolution (which always get broken) and it's not a Goal (which I'm not so good at either).  It's just one word.  I can do that!

So then I started thinking about how I wanted this word to correlate to my family history research AND work with the memories my family is making now.  All of December I spent agonizing over this choice and realized that it shouldn't have to be agonizing....that's how I feel about resolutions and I didn't want this to end as those usually do.

While many people following Ali's blog or taking the class came up with very profound, thought-provoking words, I chose something simpler.  For me, my word is Completion. 

I started by making a list of the top 10 items I wanted to complete during the year.   And I don't mean start, lose interest in and abandon.  I mean complete, as in finish, be done with....well you get the idea.  I won't list them all right now, but I can say I have made great headway already on three of those items. 

First on the list was to sign up for Mozy Home.  I actually signed up on December 30th to take advantage of a coupon for a year's subscription.  I downloaded the program, selected the files to backup on my new computer and the external hard drive (in my case these are not duplicates) and it is has been chugging along ever since.  With over 30,000 files to backup, it's a slow process but one that I feel is very worthwhile.

The second and third items on the list are really the same project, just one for each of my daughters.  When I was a child, my mother saved the greeting cards I received for birthdays, holidays and Valentine's from school friends.  She put those in a scrapbook for me and it was always so much fun to look at all of the pages.  I wanted to do the same thing for my children so when my older daughter was a year old I gathered all of the cards and put them in an album....and that is where the project stopped.  She is now nearly 7.  So I started by tackling the smaller scrapbook for my two-year-old and I can happily report hers is complete through 2010.  I am still in the sorting and organizing phase for my older daughter but am very close to putting those into an album for her.

Already Completion is working for me.  Here it is the 11th of January and I have made progress.  While my list isn't static and I do expect to make changes over the course of the year, I will continue to work through them.  Slow and steady wins the race, right?


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