Organizing Your New Year’s Resolutions

Happy New Year everyone! I sincerely hope that everyone is feeling happy and rested from the holidays, and optimistic about the new year which has finally arrived. I’ve never been big on New Year’s resolutions. I watched a lot of people make them and give up so quickly, it made me wonder why I would even bother. But this year is different! It can’t hurt to set some goals this year, and whether or not I follow through with them is entirely up to me.

My New Year’s resolutions include things like trying new types of exercise, organizing my boxes of photos, getting prints of my digital photos and organizing them, cleaning out the garage, redecorating the house, calling and writing my long distance friends more, having better posture. Pretty typical stuff like that. But where do you start when you have all these ideas about life changes for the new year? I suppose you could just write a list on a piece of paper and tack it up somewhere. But it seems to me that something like that will end up fading into the background like all the other reminders. I wanted to do something more special with my resolutions.

Then I came up with this idea. We live by calendars. Whether it’s a calendar we hang on the wall, a datebook we keep in our purse, or a calendar on our phone, we keep our lives organized by dates and schedules. So it appeared clear to me that goals could be organized in the same way. Each month I designated one to two goals. Simple and easy to achieve. So, on my 2013 calendar that hangs on the kitchen wall next to the phone I put a resolution on every month. For example “Take a Yoga Class” is written on the month of January and “Upload Digital Photos” is on February. Breaking down my resolutions to this simple form feels much less overwhelming than looking at a whole list and not knowing where to start.

I’d love to hear your ideas for organizing your New Year’s Resolutions!

Posted January 7, 2013, filed in Living Simply