It’s the last day of the Year of Time, and I think of it broadly as a success. I’ve cut my commitments to the bare minimum, and for the first time in forever have been making solid progress on self care and relaxation as a goal. Most nights, after work, there hasn’t been more work.

The Steam Deck has been life changing, being a system perfect for the playing of games and almost nothing else. My computers have always been full of too many non-gaming temptations to be effective gaming machines, even when they were very much built with that express purpose in mind.

Now I notice all the little places where previously robust systems have been allowed to atrophy. I don’t cook my own meals as often, I don’t get out for as many walks, books remain un-read, hobbies find themselves un-pursued. Foundations need to be relaid. It’s time to build again.

So what’s next?

Let’s say you were going to learn to play the piano this year. If you learn to play from a teacher, you’ll likely follow a fairly familiar pattern: learn the structure of the instrument, the names of the keys, the location of middle C. Then the structure of a chord, how certain keys played together relate to each other. You’d learn to play a few songs you hadn’t thought of since grade school.

And then you’d reach the point that breaks most people: you’d learn your scales and arpeggios.

You’d play the same series of notes over, and over, and over, moving up the scale, then down the scale, then up and down the scale, then up and down the next scale starting a single key higher. It would not sound like music. It would sound like the scene in every movie where the child is learning piano and the parent is out of their mind with the monotony of the same notes over and over and over.

And it’s awful, and you’d likely hate it. Most people do. But here’s the thing: it’s critically important. The repeated routine of the mundane is what gets you to excellence. All the while your fingers are repeating those same notes they’re building familiarity with how to move between the keys, what it feels like. Muscles and memory are strengthening together. You’re creating the conditions that will someday allow you to fly, but for today you must walk. And walk. And walk.

I’ve never met anyone that enjoys the process of playing scales and arpeggios, but the end result is Beethoven. Mozart. Chopin. Through the regular and routine practice of the basics, comes mastery.

The Year of Scales and Arpeggios

My theme for 2024 is to develop mastery of the mundane. To build the foundations and implement the systems that look like walking today, none of which are flashy or fun, that I believe will allow me to someday fly. It’s time to focus on the beautiful execution of the basic and the boring.

What does that look like in practice? Here’s a few of the things I’m thinking about currently.

• Options require decisions, decisions create opportunity cost. Remove options everywhere I can. Build and follow routines for anything important.
• If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing every day. 15 minutes a day adds up to a little more than 80 hours a year, or two standard American work weeks. I can get a lot done in 80 hours if I try.
• The simple thing I can actually do reliably will always beat the complicated thing that works occasionally, or for limited duration.

And here’s a few of my tentative plans for the new year:

• Wake up at least an hour before work starts, use 30 minutes of that time to walk on my treadmill while also doing daily planning. Stealing that idea almost entirely from CGP Grey, but it seems like a good one.
• Systematize meal planning. I’d like to create a series of week-long “menus” that can be rotated, where what we need to buy and what we’re going to eat on any given night are already planned from the meals I know we like. The weekend is a great chance to experiment with new things, because I enjoy cooking, but I don’t really want to be trying new things on a busy weeknight.
• Get real serious about the least serious sport. It’s time to really learn to play disc golf.