2019 was well on its way to be A Year of Business - I had some plans about growing my business and getting more clients or maybe explorer some passive income sources.

And then, towards the end of the year, I’ve read Fumio Sasaki’s Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism, which Apartment Therapy wonders if it’s the New “Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up”.

Burden by the expectations associated with various items from my life (I’ve bought a guitar so I must learn to play), I’ve been trying for a few years to work towards reducing such objects from my life. Goodbye, Things gives a path, a system for such reduction and that transformed 2019 into A Year of Reducing.

In 2019 I am reducing:

• possessions;
• detrimental habits;
• reliance on a single big client for my income (and there in still looping some remnants of the former planned Year of Business).

The first one, reducing possessions, is pretty clear and has a very precise goal behind it: I will get rid of a minimum of 10 possessions per month. These may be something as expensive as the guitar I mentioned, or it may be as cheap as an empty container that’s been pointlessly sitting on my desk waiting for me to decide to do something with it.

The second one, reducing detrimental habits is a bit harder to nail down as it requires a deeper introspection and also a commitment beyond my normal abilities as some of these detrimental habits are just coping means. To that extent, I will:

• reduce my consumption of alcohol or even give it up altogether (I probably sound like a heavy drinker and it’s quite the opposite; I do have a penchant for sweet liqueurs and cocktails): no more than 1 drink/week;
• paired with it, I will attempt to reduce snacking and stress-eating;
• spend less time playing video games: under 10 hours/week;
• spend less time on social media, mostly on Reddit (it’s hard because I’m a compulsive information processor) - which I will reduce to the /r/tldr sub and perhaps a handful of meta-subs like business, programming, or minimalism related ones;
• spend fewer days and weekends indoors and more out enjoying the wonderful parks my state offers;

As for the third, reducing single-client reliance, all I have is a vague goal – $100/month in recurring revenue by/at the mid-year point, $1,000/month by/at the end of the year – and a list of books:

• About the process:
  • The E-Myth Revisited
  • The Lean Startup
  • Four Steps to the Epiphany
• About the mindset:
  • Reword
  • Made to Stick
  • The Dip
  • Ego Is The Enemy
• About people in the space (biographies):
  • Shoe Dog
  • The Hard Things about Hard Things
• Misc:
  • Entreleadership
  • Build to Sell
  • The Goal
  • Rich Dad, Poor Dad
  • The Greatest Salesman in the World
  • 2019 Small Business Taxes
  • Psychology of Persuasion
  • 48 Laws of Power
  • Sell of Be Sold
  • The Slide Edge
  • The Pumpkin Plan
  • The Personal MBA

Seems quite a lot and I feel a bit overwhelmed, yet most of them are things that take little time (except for reading books) and a lot of discipline.

Ironically enough, a lot of my discipline in recent years comes from playing video-games and seeing them through, being diligent about working on multi-step quests or objectives.

Here’s to hoping.