Reflection First, Twelve Grapes Later, Shame Nowhere on the Menu
Jobert E. Abueva’s “The Janus Plan” Rearranges Familiar Self-Improvement Tools into a More Forgiving Order
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | August 25th, 2026

December gives reinvention a deadline; January gives the old self another calendar. Jobert E. Abueva builds “The Janus Plan: A No-Resolutions Path to Begin Your Year with Intention” around that collision between seasonal promise and personal continuity. Janus, the Roman god with one face turned backward and another forward, presides, though the backward face does most of the work. How can someone change direction without treating the person who arrived at the threshold as rubble? Whoever arrives may be exhausted, grieving, ambitious for borrowed reasons, or simply tired of promises whose chief accomplishment has been recurring every January. Abueva proposes informed continuation in place of reinvention – less glittering, perhaps, but far likelier to survive February.

Early in the book, Abueva returns to a Saturday in September 1997, when he sat in a Hong Kong hotel room watching the funeral of Princess Diana. Outside the room waited a successful global marketing career; inside were insomnia, loneliness, weight gain, relentless budget pressure, abandoned resolutions, and a nervous breakdown. The scene could have been recruited into the standard conversion story, in which collapse turns out to be success wearing a clever disguise. Abueva declines that promotion. Recovery arrives slowly, through a transfer request, an unpromising period of corporate limbo, and an audit of the life that professional momentum had helped him avoid seeing. He identifies a hunger for validation, a debt of exhaustion, and work no longer aligned with purpose. Later he leaves the job, moves to Greenwich Village with his partner, takes writing classes, publishes an essay, and recovers both his health and a marketing career on altered terms. The method he eventually develops is born not at a summit but in the stalled elevator.

Most annual planning systems begin with desire: Where do you want to go? Who do you want to become? “The Janus Plan” begins with receipts. Its first of six Steps, “Ponder the Past,” sends readers through journals, photographs, calendars, messages, financial records, and other artifacts before they name a year’s highs, lows, themes, lessons, and implications. A headline and subheading then compress the mass of events into a provisional reading. Only after this work does “Frame the Future” introduce goals, strategies, deadlines, small wins, accountability, and vision boards. Putting the audit first is Abueva’s real argument. Otherwise, validation hunger or accumulated exhaustion may simply receive a brighter assignment. A goal can look new while remaining an old appetite in January ribbon.

Evidence from Abueva’s own life tests the exercise on messier material than a list of wins and losses suggests. In one annual review, he places creative accomplishments and renewed health beside the death of his father, the departure of housemates, and the end of a relationship in which he was ghosted after ten months. Travel restrictions turn him back in Honolulu, denying him a final goodbye to his father. From that year he draws themes including abandonment, healthy habits, rediscovery, and persistence, then writes the headline “Returning to My Spark.” The exercise sounds like scrapbooking with a management degree, yet its effect is subtler. Loss and achievement can occupy the same record without becoming equivalent or requiring sorrow to improve quarterly performance.

The diagnosis does not remain in the notebook. “Nudge the Now” assigns one avoided task; “Clean and Clear” extends preparation into physical, digital, bodily, and financial environments; “Revel in Ritual” gathers New Year practices from around the world; and “Revisit and Reignite” establishes weekly, monthly, quarterly, and half-yearly reviews. Abueva crowds the pages with named prompts – the Life Pie, the Clearing Quad, “Procrastination Bingo,” “Tapestry Tally,” “Pause at the Loom.” Every worksheet seems to have arrived wearing a conference badge. Strip away the labels and the movement is clean: understand, imagine, act, clear, mark, return.

Return is where the plan outlives its January performance. Abueva’s own cadence includes a short Sunday review, a monthly hour, and longer quarterly sessions, but frequency remains adjustable rather than sacred. His “Tapestry Tally” records accomplishments, heavy moments, pivots, coming events, and anticipated joys. A quarterly review ends with a signed statement, making adjustment feel more like a renewed agreement than an admission of failure. Strategies may change; values need not. A lapse becomes information instead of a verdict. “Revisit and Reignite” therefore does more than maintain the previous Steps: it changes what a lapse means. The plan is not a contract that an undisciplined future self will inevitably breach. It anticipates interruption and makes re-entry procedural, an important kindness in a genre whose systems often work beautifully until a human life occurs. Intention and circumstance will renegotiate the terms; Abueva has sensibly put the meeting on the calendar.

If the order belongs to Abueva, most of the tools do not. SMART goals, backward planning, Pomodoro intervals, streaks, accountability partners, vision boards, decluttering grids, and subscription audits do not become inventions merely because they have been invited to a New Year’s party. Technique by technique, “The Janus Plan” is less novel than its renamed exercises suggest. Nor does declining to call goals resolutions transform their mechanics. The difference lies in placement: retrospection before ambition, revision after action, with one immediate task, a clearing, and a ritual between them. Abueva has not discovered new ingredients. He has changed the service – reflection first, twelve grapes later, shame nowhere on the menu.

Prose makes the leniency audible. Abueva favors medium-length explanations, direct invitations, parallel constructions, questions, lists, and brief assurances. His vocabulary moves among tactics, grace, and ceremony: goals need a plan, the self receives some mercy, the year acquires a threshold. He rarely scolds. Even procrastination appears as a behavior with causes – fear, perfectionism, overwhelm, distraction – rather than proof of defective character. The voice is earnest, sociable, curious, more interested in helping readers resume than in catching them falling short. Anyone weary of productivity books that address the audience like disappointing regional offices may find the gentleness restorative. Devotees of compression may begin eyeing the exit while Abueva is still decorating the doorway.

Abueva locates his weaving image in a Filipino headband he made as a Cub Scout; thereafter lives become tapestries, experiences become threads, habits become patterns, reflection becomes work at the loom. Janus supplies the doors, passages, beginnings, and endings. Together these figures lift planning from clerical task to threshold practice. They also recur past the point of diminishing return. A metaphor should illuminate the room, not apply for tenancy. The finest passages need less ornament: the hotel room, the denied farewell, the discarded plan, and the old vision board command attention unaided.

Pain, however, does not always cooperate with a workbook. Abueva sometimes escorts suffering to its lesson too efficiently. His breakdown, his father’s death, and his experiences of abandonment become examples within a workable method, but usefulness can sand down what experience leaves jagged. The prose favors reassuring reversals: failure becomes feedback, perfection yields to progress, rigidity softens into renewal. One such reversal can console; several in succession can make grief appear swiftly tidied. Abueva is most persuasive when a scene resists the lesson assigned to it. A life may form a pattern without every loose thread consenting to become decorative.

Across the six Steps, Abueva moves from inventory to projection, one avoided task, clearing, celebration, and review. The alliteration is polish; the order is substance. “The Bullet Journal Method” by Ryder Carroll likewise connects recording the past, ordering the present, and designing the future through a customizable practice, but Abueva is less interested in managing information than in giving transition symbolic form. His chronology assigns different work to each tense: the past must be interpreted, the future imagined, the present given an action small enough to survive contact with Tuesday afternoon. The book is better used than consumed straight through. A first trip across every list exposes repetition; later returns reveal the design. The pages are meant to acquire marginalia, corrections, and evidence of changing weather. Within each Step, the rhythm is equally regular: epigraph, rationale, personal example, exercise, recap, companion prompt. That predictability makes the method easy to use and, at times, easier to anticipate than the prose seems to realize.

Decluttering is where Abueva’s appetite for inclusion gets expensive. “Clean and Clear” ranges across possessions, apps, inboxes, photographs, storage, food, movement, skincare, subscriptions, budgets, and other accumulated residue. Abueva candidly admits that he does not perform every possible clearing himself, a welcome concession. Yet bodily-cleansing language needs firmer evidentiary boundaries, while the chapter’s reach turns a purposeful Step into general amnesty for the reader’s entire backlog. The Step has a clear purpose; its guest list is the problem.

In “Revel in Ritual,” that appetite goes global. The chapter tours New Year customs across the South Pacific, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and North America: grapes swallowed at midnight, suitcases carried in hope of travel, first-footing, colored underwear, polar plunges, lucky foods, noise enlisted against misfortune. After several continents, delight begins to resemble inventory. Abueva wants ritual to embody an intention, connect a solitary plan to communal memory, and admit pleasure into a genre inclined to mistake grimness for seriousness. He encourages readers to choose or adapt practices according to cultural resonance, belief, company, and appetite, and includes sensible cautions about safety. Even so, cultural portability is not culturally neutral. Practices are not simply techniques with more colorful accessories; their meanings live in histories, communities, and forms of belonging that a brisk survey cannot carry intact. At this speed, lived practices risk becoming souvenirs arranged by continent. Curiosity does not eliminate the need for depth or selectivity.

Midnight grapes and lucky foods matter less as advice than as evidence for Abueva’s larger claim: knowing a goal is not the same as feeling bound to it. Symbols, gestures, meals, witnesses, and repeated actions make an intention felt. The personal origin is quieter: Abueva’s father taught him that the first day could set the tone for what followed. Celebration is not a prize awarded after successful self-command here; it is part of how commitment takes hold. Amid professional burnout, digital distraction, social disconnection, and the pressure to convert every hour into proof of worth, ritual gives an intention a body, a date, perhaps a meal, and ideally another person who remembers it. “The Janus Plan” retains goals and metrics while asking whether they arise from examined values or from the same validation hunger that exhausted the planner. It does not abandon ambition. It asks whose desire ambition is serving.

In the end, Abueva is less interested in January than in continuity after rupture. He does not ask readers to adore the past, preserve every habit, or mistake endurance for virtue. He asks them to look long enough to determine what the future is inheriting. The clean slate asks less of memory, which is part of its seduction. Reinvention can be exhilarating because it exempts the imagined new self from the history of the actual one; retrospection restores the bill. Yet the same record also returns six published opinion pieces, a completed boyhood memoir, renewed meditation, better health, and desires once postponed rather than extinguished. Looking backward uncovers resourcefulness as well as damage. The backward-facing Janus is not the pessimistic twin. He is the keeper of the records.

The idea is more selective than the book. Repetition, metaphorical saturation, an overextended cultural survey, and blurred boundaries among research, personal testimony, wellness convention, and symbolic practice keep the prose from matching the precision of the architecture. The recurring reviews, however, are built for lives interrupted by work, fatigue, loss, or a change of mind. I rate “The Janus Plan” 79/100, which corresponds to 3/5 Goodreads stars. The plan is sound; the book keeps adding provisions after the bags are packed.

Rather than promise a new self, Abueva ends on “Welcome forward,” the phrase his whole method has been approaching. It revises the customary promise of the New Year, which imagines time as a border checkpoint where unwanted selves may be abandoned before one proceeds with lighter luggage. His doorway works differently. We arrive carrying the hotel room, the missed goodbye, the goals achieved for the wrong reasons, the habits that helped, the intentions that failed, and the rituals whose meanings outlast their explanations. “The Janus Plan” occasionally brings too much through that doorway, but emptiness was never the object. Janus looks both ways because a future worth entering requires someone to remember who is crossing.