Wake up January 1, go to the gym, write in your journal, make yourself a green smoothie, call your second cousin twice removed, make dinner for all your family members (attempting to find something they all like), walk your yippy dog, text your friend to see how her interview went and floss. Just like that you’ve checked off all your resolutions for the new year! Now, you just have to keep it up for 364 days!
New Year’s Eve is a great time for contemplating small manners in which you can improve your life. However, it is difficult to maintain that long of a list of resolutions all at once. A person can only handle so much change at a time. When attempting to alter an extensive list, rather than learning, your brain goes into overload and ends up failing at everything you wanted to succeed at. At this moment, you lose your motivation and feel defeated.
Rather than lying to yourself, telling yourself you will get everything together at 12:01 a.m. on some random day, it is imperative to constantly be evaluating your life in order to find things you can change to make it better. There is no date when you have to make a specific resolution, do it now. Now is the time. Not starting now is merely an excuse.
New Year’s resolutions can be wonderful but they can also be excuses. We excuse ourselves from doing arduous things, like saying we will stop eating Nutella out of the jar tomorrow, start going to the pilates class in the morning or turn off the TV and starting reading Sunday night. If there is something you want to do, do it now! I implore you!
I know. You are about to scroll away from this article for being too extremely cliché and peppy, thinking she has her life together and is trying to brag. First, I do not have everything together. Second, I am here trying to help you. So, realistically, here are a few things you can do in order to evaluate your life and then improve it.
What do you want to eventually do? I always say I want to play the cello. Cool. That’s great. What am I doing about it? Nothing. Take a grip of what you want to do and start now. Save up for your cello, your Ford Flex, your island home on Captiva or save up for your grad school degree. Even if it’s a dollar a day you transfer to savings, that’ll be a dollar more than you had before.
What do you do every day? Do you do at least one thing to advance your career? Probably not. For me, I want to be an actress. I take fifteen minutes a day to search for monologues, do a vocal warmup or look into places I could intern over the summer. It’s only fifteen minutes, meaning you just have to watch one less episode of Friends. I promise. Can you look into publishers for your poetry you dabble in? Can you look into what it takes to open that coffee shop you dream of? Can you read a chapter in that book on the new shortcuts in technology? Yes. Yes, you can.
Now that you’re thinking about your life, on a day to day basis, can you create a rough schedule? Color blocks are easy for me to see and accomplish, so I highlight my classes, gym time, and homework in different colors. By sectioning off your day, you will ensure you are completing all the tasks you want to. This will also make achieving your new goals more tangible and then everything will seem a lot less scary.
Yes. Go you. Make resolutions. Try to improve. However, don’t wait for the ball to drop to transform those ideas into actions. Do it. Now. Little by little. Trust me, you will thank yourself later.
Go on. You know what you have to do. Do it.
Photo Credit: Eleanor Ritzman