No new year’s resolutions this year

When 2023 first rolled around, I set a lot of big goals for the year. I even had a fun little tracking technique using weekly pocket notebooks. After nine months, I had reverted to my baseline in a lot of ways, but there were some positive developments, overall.

This year, I got in a conversation about new year’s resolutions, and I realized that while I like setting goals around this time of year, I don’t really feel like trying to commit myself to any audacious year-long endeavors.

Setting a goal for a whole year isn’t a completely impossible commitment, but I find that what I want to focus on in life changes a little more often than that. After a while, I question whether I can really keep it up the whole year, or I just forget about it eventually. In such cases, I can’t help but feel it would have been better to commit to a shorter time period and wrap the goal up with a sense of success.

For example, the 100-post challenge was a big undertaking for me, and at the end I felt satisfied with what I had done. But that was only a five-month project. If I had said, “I’m going to write a blog post every weekday for a year”, I’m not so sure I would have kept it up.

Anyway, this might all just be rationalization, but I don’t think I’m slacking because of it. I have plenty of ideas for goals I want to set, but this year, I’m going to do them by seasons instead. So here are some of my goals for this winter, specifically:

• a regular exercise routine
• host a singing-focused event
• re-establish my posting habit on gomepage
• finish a choral piece I’ve been working on
• some other things I’m still fleshing out

At the spring equinox, I’ll do a check-in to see how these goals went, and I’ll try to set new ones for the spring. Hopefully the shortened scope will help me focus on these goals and make them feel more manageable.