I did some brainstorming in the last few weeks of the year, but it amounted to 15 minutes here, 20 minutes there. Probably no more than an hour total.

I jotted down categories for goals:

* diet
* fitness
* health
* organization
* productivity
* skills
* spiritual

Then I jotted down any and all possible tweaks for each. I made them as specific as possible. Some were isolated tweaks (”make three health-related appointments you’ve been putting off”) and others were obvious steps in a larger pattern (”walk for 20 minutes 4 times,” “walk for 40 minutes 5 times”).

If you break goals into manageable steps, then you will find you have quite a lot of possible tweaks, as I did. But I won’t reproduce them here. Many of them may not appeal to me in the end, and my idea is to be flexible.

I think, for example, that eating more whole foods figured somehow in my original brainstorm lists, but I don’t think I had “Eat beans every day” listed. So I kind of have a vague larger plan, but I am also kind of winging it based on how I feel.

Since I have so many areas to work on, it may make things easy for me to have something in mind each week.

Oh, and I do use the rice cooker a lot. I splurged on a fancy one with a timer which I use for other things even more often than for rice. Today it did the oats, and then in the afternoon, a pot of cannelini beans, which became soup.

I failed miserably in my tweak last week. You were right about the difficulty of the task. Thankfully, I need not dwell on it. Next week, I will attack the problem from the correct side, I will try to go to bed early. No later than 11. I hope.

At some point this week I stopped getting residual benefits from my overall intention to improve in manageable pieces. But I look forward to next week, which is nice. I guess I need to make lists. You did extensive list-making for what you want to do this year?