Outlook Good: Where do I start, where do I begin?

So, here's the idea I am going to endeavour for one full year to let a magic eight ball make my decisions for me. Well, not exactly all of my decisions. I mean the world wide web tells me that research suggests humans make approximately 200 food and beverage related choices a day, most without even thinking of it. No, I will restrict this to any decision that I don't make after 5 minutes of thinking about it. I've decided this in part out of considerations for practically, but moreover to try to get at one of the key reasons why I decided to embark on this journey: I all to often suffer analysis paralysis and I want to lessen the amount of time I spend in this state. I also thought that this could be my 'hook'; we'll see if it catches anything other than an old boot.

I also wanted to engage in an activity that would give me the opportunity to practice daily discipline as I find that my discipline often comes in, to put it politely, fits and starts. Finally, I wanted to work on something that would help me to improve my writing skills. I've read many times that part of refining writing skills is just simply writing and writing regularly. While many exercises I've read about in this vein put a word limit on this type of practice, I've decided that, for the time being, I'm not going to do that; rather, I'm just going to focus on trying to have one entry per day. Entries will focus then on some aspect of a decision or decisions that I made using the magic eight ball. I suspect that some entries - like this one - will be less entertaining and more banal, some even just made to make the daily requirement part of this challenge to myself. But, I also think that some will allow for a lot of personal reflection and others still will, hopefully, be funny, thought-provoking or in some other way interesting to anyone else who may happen upon this project.

I had originally contemplated starting this blog on January 1st, but I'm not much of one for New Year's resolutions in the strict sense. For no real good reason, new year's resolutions that start on January first feel like I'd be setting myself up to travel down a road that is doomed to failure. So, with that timeline scratched I kind of shelved the whole idea until I experienced a bit of existential angst last week which was brought on by equal parts mild career dissatisfaction, coming off a week long flu that had me a bit shack whacky, and - oddly - having just watched the movie the Descendants. I decided that April 1st is the beginning of a new year of sorts (a new fiscal year at work) and that it seemed as good as day as any. Well, that and when I spent time thinking about whether today - April 1st - would be the day, I asked the magic eight ball app on my iPhone: "should I start the blog today?" and it responded: "outlook good." And, so it begins...