A Systemic Breakdown

This year I am going to make a clean restart of every area of my life. From my spiritual life, to my marriage, parenting, ministry, writing, academic, and personal responsibilities, I plan to spend the next year working through it all. I’m calling it the Year of Rebooting.

The trick is, that’s a lot to sort through and make sense of. When it comes to organizing our lives and living up to our responsibilities, each of us are wired in very different ways. For some, systems are overwhelming. A simple, effective list of priorities paired with a daily to-do list may be all that’s needed. For others, a detailed and thorough system is required to help them think through everything that is on their plate. Neither is right or wrong, it all depends on the way our minds think and the circumstances of our lives. But regardless of the what kind of system we have, or don’t have, everyone needs organizing principles for their life.

When it comes to systems, I am on the more complicated end of the spectrum. I need heavier, more detailed systems. I need daily routines, weekly lists of priorities, and a system to track the many projects I’m committed to. I don’t simply like having detailed systems in place, nor does it come naturally to me. But I need them to compensate for my shortcomings. My system has never flowed from my strength, but rather from my weakness.

And in the last year it has become clear that these systems are not working in most areas of my life right now. Simply put, they are no longer compensating for the right things. As a husband and parent of two very small children, my systems for ensuring they have enough of my time, attention, and care are no longer working. As a writer, my system is not protecting my writing and creative time. As a student my system… and on, and on, and on. Hence, the Year of Rebooting.

Unlike my previous annual planning, my approach this year is not heavily structured. I will build the airplane while it’s in the air, as it were. Starting this month I will inventory every area of my life, identify problem areas, and kill off any thing that needs to go. Soon I will post about how I’m doing this, but for now here are the areas I’m starting with (in rough priority):

• Spiritual life
• Marriage
• Family life
• Ministry
• Writing
• Academics

While I will certainly not be sharing all of the details, I do want to document and share how I go about rebooting my life this year. I’ll detail some of the ways I explore and evaluate these areas, and share some of the solutions I put in place.

Maybe this is interesting to you. Maybe you feel the same need, the same pull, to reboot and reframe your life and your systems. Maybe you’ve never even thought of systems in this way. As you can clearly see, I’m no guru. I’m a guy who developed a system years ago that worked really well to fight against my biggest areas of weakness. And now, I need to do it again.

I will keep writing about this stuff here as I go along, and maybe it’s interesting, or helpful to you. Or maybe it’s fun for you to watch people flail around. 😂 Whatever the reason, if you want to keep up with my process this year, you can subscribe to my email newsletter or subscribe to the RSS feed for this site in your RSS feedreader. ¹