I postmortem each month shortly after it ends, reflecting on what happened in general and, more specifically, in the context of my goals. Though I don’t share all my insights here, I have made it a practice to share at least one key highlight or insight. (To read previous months’ reviews, click here.)

Well hey.

I went into my review of January’s progress against my 2021 goals with a bit of trepidation. I had the sinking feeling all month that I’d already fallen grossly behind schedule across several fronts.

And while I haven’t made nearly the progress on my personal writing goals as I’d intended for the first twelfth of the year, I did not completely face plant on my other objectives.

Whether I can credit the surprise to having cut myself a bit more slack in the goals I set for this year or whether I just didn’t realize how much I’d accomplished in light of focusing on what I didn’t accomplish, I still need to recalibrate my time in the months to come to give more space in my nonworking hours to my personal writing efforts.

Motivation: When I finally carved out an evening in late January to work on a much delayed article for this site, I may still have sat there a while at the keyboard, fighting the drop into the writing process, yet once I started I lost myself so completely in the flow that I couldn’t believe how much time had passed when I lifted my head.

More of that feeling, please.

Nevertheless, I’ll still go ahead and pat myself on the back for doing more outreach to friends and potential friends, of which I’d felt the lack last year. By late 2020, I felt extremely isolated and adrift from genuine connection.

Rather than wallowing in it, I did more work in January to reach out to new people I’ve met—even virtually—and to people with whom I hadn’t had real interaction in far too long. And though that doesn’t mean I suddenly feel social—if feeling “social” is even possible in a pandemic that requires as much physical distancing as possible—it does feel like progress.