I don't have a lot of new years rituals, and out of the three new years I celebrate, this is probably the one with the least spiritual significance for me. My anniversary is in here, and a lot of fraught family feelings (especially this year) so it's not a good time for resolutions and big new projects.
But this year my notebook is almost full, so I'm switching to a new one on the first. For the first time in a long time, I love my system and my type of notebook enough that I just bought another of the same kind of notebook, and I'm moving only because I'm nearly out of pages. It makes me really happy to have something that's working.
Since I'm going to be starting the year with a fresh notebook, I was thinking about clearing other things that have been overwhelming me, too.
I love Pocket. I love Evernote. I love having a place to put things I want to read so I don't have to read them right now, and I love having a place to put things I want to reference later so I no longer have to maintain an extensively tagged del.icio.us account or dozens of folders for my fiction. But it's also easy to let things get away from me. On Sunday I noted I had seventy five or so things sitting in Pocket, waiting for me to read them, and at least that many things in my intake folder on Evernote, waiting for me to read them and sort them.
Well, I'm reading them.
I've whittled Pocket down to about fifteen things so far, finishing fanfics, taking notes on articles, and shifting things I want to keep for reference into Evernote. The Evernote sorting goes a little more quickly, as there are fewer decisions to make and less reading required, just sorting.
None of this is going to change my life, probably. But the timing is a good reminder to make it a priority. Putting a few things in order as I come out of a very busy season cuts down on my overall level of overwhelm, and right now anything that does that is a good thing.