I've written down my intentions for 2021 and what I'd like to focus on in the coming year

• Work on my game projects at least three times a week: I have several tabletop RPG projects that I want to work on and complete this year, including the long-overdue Pepper&Carrot fate-based RPG and the Dramasystem RPG for the personal computer revolution. This might include other computer-based games as well, but these are the biggies that I want to work on.

• Meditation and mindfulness: I've semi-maintained the meditation habit over the past year. This year I'd like to deepen that more. The mindfulness is about being present with each moment and relaxing into it without distraction. That leads to the following intention:

• Work with less distractions and more focus on deeper work (Relentlessly prune bullshit): This is about keeping myself from flitting between social media, chats, email, and other things and allowing myself to work on what I am working on without distraction. This is about being OK with the discomfort of not knowing what's going on. The "Relentlessly Pruning Bullshit" got pushed up here as part of this because it's about stripping away what isn't essential, including online conversations that try to get my attention without any practical benefit. It's about placing focus on what matters and is most important.

• Walk or ride the recumbent bike at least four times a week: Adding more motion to my sedentary lifestyle. I've held this intention without doing it for a few years now so it's time to make it stick.

• Get further out of debt: I'm tired of spending money in order to keep credit card companies happy. I calculated one card was a thousand dollars per year, and that was a small card. I've spent too much money on crap over the years, and over time I've realized that many of those purchases have gone unused. They were put there by trying to keep up with other people or with the idea that I would somehow use them to further my game design goals. That never happened, and it was because I knew deep down that wasn't an area that I would explore. So it lead to me buying a bunch of board games that never had the shrinkwrap removed. That's foolish. I'm paying interest on older versions of myself. In order to better serve newer versions of myself I need to forgive myself and allow myself space to remove the debt.

• Play more games: Kinda hard to be a game designer when you don't play many games. It's also kinda hard to play a lot of these games if you don't give them focus and learn the rules. I have a hard time with the rules of these games and teaching them. The way to get better about teaching and learning games is to play them. This also relates to playing RPG games. I haven't played any in a long time, so if this is a space that I want to design in it might help actually playing a few games.

• Spend at least one night a week working on programming projects: I didn't do as well with this over the past year, so I'm giving myself at least one night a week to work on this.

• Declutter and make our place more alive: Making this an actual intention. This is part of "Relentlessly Prune Bullshit" above and "Getting further out of debt". I've accumulated a lot of stuff over the years through various means (what I've termed "ghosts"). Things that showed up because I was semi-interested in them, or because someone that is no longer in my life recommended it. I've been going through and pruning the shelves and drawers of stuff that isn't relevant to me anymore.

This is what I'm hoping to work on in the coming year. I won't try to tackle all of it at once and some months may get more focus than others, but these are my focus for the coming year.