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Photo by Malglam (Flickr)

Every year, I make new year’s resolutions.  They tend to be overly ambitious blueprints detailing how I plan to transform myself into a quintessential Mary Poppins – Practically Perfect in Every Way – stepping into my ideal vision of myself: someone who eats perfectly, exercises regularly, studies every day, and never ever uses throwaway containers (etc. etc. ad nauseum).  In other words, my new year’s resolutions lists (manifestos, really), are doomed to failure.

Over the past few years, I’ve managed to cut them back from several double-sided pages to just a page or two.  But last year, I tried to increase my chances of success by building a whole new year’s resolutions binder system, where each resolution had its own tab and associated calendars, performance measures and a way to track results (can you tell I work in a cubicle?).  Of course, after a few days, the binder ended up piled under the paper avalanche on my desk, and was never seen again until I unearthed it a couple of days into 2009.  Looking through it, I saw that as usual, I had not met most of my goals for the year, but had met some, so, it wasn’t a total failure.  But still, the madness had to stop.  Earth to self: all of these goals amount to personal growth, which is a huge, ongoing process.  Stop trying to force personal growth by organizing it to death!!  Sheesh.

Anyhow, this year, I limited myself to 5 goal areas (in no particular order): financial, arts, writing, health, and school.  I have many, many more goals, but I am trying to just focus on a handful of them to preserve my sanity.  Onward:

1. Financial stuff

Only two goals here: pay off my line of credit, and start saving in a Tax Free Savings Account.  To kickstart this, I opened the TFSA and deposited a symbolic $5 in it.  My line of credit is not too scary, but it still drives me NUTS carry any kind of debt around.  I had a similar amount of debt this time last year, and paid it off by April…at which point I went on a trip to Spain for a couple of weeks and went right back in the hole again.  And when I was almost dug out from that, I moved apartments (always more expensive than one thinks), then went on a trip to BC for a couple of weeks.  So, I’ve decided that as much as I love to travel, I need to have the discipline to not travel again until my debt is paid off and I can save up for the trip and travel on saved funds.  Also, I need to stop shopping.  Seriously.

2. Arts

This one is intended to keep me from neglecting my crafty side, and includes things like finishing a sewing project, making something out of the huge bags of buttons I’ve collected, and using the drawing tablet I snagged in a boxing day sale.  And I’d really like to learn to knit in the not-too-distant future.  It seems very relaxing.

3. Writing

My goal this year is to submit two articles for publication (one academic, one not), try to blog at least once a week in both of my blogs (since during busy times I tend to fall off the wagon), and sit down to do some creative writing once a week.

4. Health

This year, as every year, I resolve to improve my health.  The goals are mostly the same as always, and include:

• Get to bed early.
• Floss regularly instead of sporadically (eww, I know).
• Keep an exercise calendar again (I used to do this and found it really helped).
• Go mostly raw foods (have done this before and it felt great! …just so hard to keep it up, especially in the dead of winter).
• Cut out gluten and soy (as per recent test results…should make going raw easier too).

5. Grad school

This year I’m getting organized to write my thesis, so I resolved to put together a project binder for it based on the notebook method.  I just completed this yesterday, and although I’m sure it will need to undergo some tweaking, I am so far quite optimistic about it.  I am also working on scheduling study times, although in a realistic way this time instead of aiming for some horrendous every-waking-minute-scheduled thing like I tend to do.

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I am thinking about using “don’t break the chain”-style calendars to help motivate my thesis work, exercise, and flossing.  I don’t dig the web app so much (unless there’s a way to show all different chain calendars on one page?) so I think I’ll just make up paper page printouts like this for each goal and tape them to the relevant places (desk, bathroom wall).  In fact, looking at this, I think these three goals are my top three.  When they are going well, I bet everything else will too.

Anyhow, that’s the rundown.  It still seems like too much to try to change all at once.  I certainly do feel like it makes more sense to tackle one goal at a time, or one per month, but the reality is that I need to get healthy in a big way, debt sucks, and I need to dig into my thesis if I’m going to keep my MA program rolling.  So I guess I will just muddle along on these and stay focused, but try not get discouraged if I can’t build Rome in a day.