On the new year

In case you live under a rock, we entered a new year (and a new decade) a few days ago. With each new year, most people (including myself) take the annual restart as a way to reassess what our goals are, and how we want to better ourselves in the next 365 or so days.

A few years ago, I stopped making hard rules for my New Year's Resolutions, because I felt that if I broke them even a little, I would give up altogether. Instead, I've found I tend to get the most out of the concept when I set big goals for myself and come up with a loose plan for how to accomplish it. Last year, I wanted to read more. I set a big goal (for me, at least) of 24 books -- two a month. I did great for the first half of the year, then got caught on a couple of books that took a week or two longer. Before I knew it, I was several books behind on my schedule and lost the drive I had to read in all my free time.

So I learned from that. This year, I want to bring back that good habit of reading often, but I'm setting a more attainable goal for myself of at least one book per month. The books I'm reading aren't ridiculously complicated. There's no reason it should take me that long to read one with my schedule, but it's a forgiving goal. It's a goal that allows me to reach my base level wants and then keep going when I'm able.

That's how I'm trying to approach all my resolutions this year — personal goals that I can kind of attain by doing XYZ, and can push myself to be better from that point.

New Year's Resolutions aren't the most exciting thing to read about, I'm well aware. As I sat down to do this very blog post, I told Ben, "I'm just not sure how to make my New Year's Resolutions interesting. Everyone makes them." I think my probably-not-unpopular take on resolutions is that you don't actually need the start of a new year to make them. It just provides a reason to evaluate where we are in terms of our larger hopes for ourselves.

So whether your resolutions last a day, a week, a month or all year (or if you're like me and keep making new resolutions throughout the year), I hope 2020 is a good one. Happy New Year, folks.