Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Not exactly resolutions

As someone with negative "Completer/Finisher" ratings on Belbin, I've never done particularly well with New Year resolutions...When I was a child, my father used to advise me to "Aim for the stars and you might hit the mountain tops". I've embraced the "aim for the stars" part just fine through the years, regularly setting myself ridiculously high standards, and resolving to achieve at the very least six impossible things before breakfast, but I have tended to assume that anything less than a stellar success rate was grounds for early despair...
Not the stuff of which successful New Year resolvers are made, in short.
However, wandering around the internet on this last day of my holidays, I've been struck by how many wise and sensible approaches to the whole "new year, new start" thing there are. OK, so I've never got anywhere before, but I've also never made my hopes or intentions public - and I'm wondering if a measure of accountability to my friends may help to sustain my resolve, particularly if I am at least slightly realistic in my ambitions.

So - I have three things in my sights as 2008 begins (in no particular order)
  1. To take the dogs out for at least some sort of walk myself every. single. day. The dogs need it - and I probably need it even more, as cycling round the parish never seems to be enough to encourage anything like fitness (and when I move, I suspect that cycling may actually become harder too)
  2. To restrict on-line playtime to before Morning Prayer and after Evening Prayer only from Monday to Friday (day off excepted). The possibilities of infinite diversion are just too great, and a day of non achievement sends me grumpy to bed!
  3. (The biggie) To do things on time - maybe to set myself artificial deadlines if that's what it takes to get stuff done (yes, even expenses) (I do recognise the irony of posting this on the second day of the New Year - but Rome wasn't built in a day, so I'm not going to get picky!)
Thus far, I've managed with number 1, and I don't return to work till tomorrow so numbers 2 & 3 have yet to become issues. Wish me luck, blogmates

1 comment:

Diane M. Roth said...

good luck! great list! I love what you talked about re: aim for the stars! There is some truth in that.