New Year’s Resolutions
I have never really been a strong proponent of making New Year’s Resolutions, at least not on January 1st. It never made any sense to me to put off a fix for any length of time that you might want to make in your life. Additionally, is it not on your birthday that one’s new year truly starts, as opposed to on January 1st? That having been said, I made a couple of them anyhow…most notably to communicate with friends & family better.
I have since thrown most of these out (other than communicating better)…and am instead opting to follow up with an idea that a friend tweeted me, New Week Resolutions (which I’ve linked below). The idea is simple: make a new resolution each week of something that you want to fix in your life. Maybe you can read more, maybe you can exercise twice this week, etc etc. And if you need to make a major change…make that your resolution for a few weeks in a row, or try to build into it week-by-week. Fewer cigarettes each week until you stop, for instance.
Given how I tend to live my life by staring at shiny things until I forget what I was talking about…wait, where was I? Right. In any case, I personally am far more likely to be excited about and keep a resolution each week as opposed to keeping one for a full year. Of course, I suppose that making a new resolution a week is somewhat a full year resolution in itself…so we’ll see how this holds out.
I’ve already succeeded at this week’s resolution (partially rebuild the site into a blog) and am excited to start on next week’s resolution, which is to at long last get the inside of my car clean. Is that a resolution? Yeah, I kinda think it is…
New Year’s Resolution alternative: 52 New Week’s Resolutions
I love that idea! 🙂 I’m not always great with my resolutions either; last year I achieved about half of them. this year I tried to make them simple so I hope I will do better. maybe I could make some weekly resolutions too!
I’d say that achieving any more than 10% of your resolutions is parade worthy, given how I usually do at mine…so half is amazing! How have yours been going so far? 🙂
I never put a name on it, but this is similar to my motivation for the year. I’ve been working on making myself happier this year, and in order to do that I’ve made a list of rule to follow. One example is instead of being annoyed by something that bothers me I need to take a breath, a step back, and find a solution to that issue.
I know it sounds like a really straight forward idea, but how many times do we just live with that crooked picture on the wall because you can fix it later? I figured I was spending more time being annoyed by the little problems when I could’ve fixed them in a fraction of the time.
Anyway, I’ve been spending my year trying to find logical solutions to the problems in my life. It hasn’t worked every time, and believe me, I’m not always happy. Still though, I think that taking the time to fix, clean, or change the small things in my life has helped to make me feel more accomplished.