I've spent most of my career advocating for strategic planning, but never thought I needed to do it personally. Now, I'm rethinking "resolutions" & what they mean for academia.

Tl;dr: I love strategic planning but think resolutions are a dead-end. Here are the top 5 tools I use instead.

There is a lot of similarity between this pile of (blank) to-do lists and my piles of un-finished to-do lists. I'm okay with that for reasons I detail below. (Image: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay)

It's not quite far enough into January for your inbox to have emptied of people and businesses suggesting this or that resolution you should make, this game-changer product that will help you with your "new year, new me" habit you'll break before Valentine's Day, or some personal reflection about how much reflection they've been doing, and how they're doing this whole new-year thing differently.

If you're still prepping your class(es) for the semester (I'm with you), just want a break from the "anticipate the future" buzz when the future feels bleak (still with you), or need to focus on the seventeen other things on your to-do list (yep, me, too), then feel free to skip this one.

But, if you have any bandwidth at all for thinking about how you want to frame your approach to the semester/term or th…