101 in 1001

A while ago a friend told me she made a list of 101 things that she had to accomplish in the next 1001 days. I'm not sure where she had gotten the idea or where/ when/ how the 101 in 1001 thing started, but I really like the idea. I especially like making lists of things, so it's right up my alley.

I’m still in application limbo as I’ve been waitlisted at two schools. With no deadline for when I might get an answer, I’m going to give the wait lists another month to come through before I have to start settling into a plan B for the coming year. But the 101 in 1001 is a good exercise for mapping out where I want to focus my energy in the near future, grad school or no.

I had a couple of rules to which I tried to adhere when making my list:

1) Completion of the tasks should depend solely on whether or not I invest enough time and effort. In other words, chance and luck shouldn’t play a role in how much I accomplish. I had to leave “win the lottery” and “catch a homerun or foul ball at a baseball game” off the list for that reason, but there are still a couple of tasks that will definitely be aided by a fortuitous alignment of the stars. Finding 101 things I really wanted to be proactive about was actually quite hard.

2) I tried to avoid equating purchases with goals. I’ve been meaning to buy a nice TV for a while, but that doesn’t really seem like a great goal. I am, however, going to allow “buy (and enjoy!) a motorcycle” and “buy (and enjoy!) a $100+ bottle of Scotch” since those are more about the lifestyle associations than the purchases per se. There are actually quite a few tasks centered around saving money, which I really need to do, but there are also a lot that will require a significant inve$tment.

A few of my 101 in 1001 are
-Drive cross country
-Walk across the Brooklyn Bridge
-Get a story or article published
-Write a (good) song
-Stick to a budget for a month
-Learn enough Spanish to watch movies sans subtitles

I plan on adding this to my webpage, complete with updates, once I get to work on that again. So my 1001 starts today, June 1, 2006. It will end on February 26, 2009, if Excel calculations are to be trusted. Time to get to work.