I’ve always been a failure at annual resolutions. As in, resolve to do mostly the obvious things (lose weight, get organized, eat better, exercise, do a better job at housekeeping) and mostly fail at them all within a couple weeks.
Somewhere I read about the idea of making mini-resolutions each month. The idea being to make just one new resolution each month, and make it small and really easy so you can actually keep it up.
By the end of the month, whatever change is supposed to be so habitual you keep going, but then you add a new resolution – maybe intensifying the first one or tackling a new area of yourself you want to improve.
Sort of a ‘baby step’ method to sneak up on the goals you really want to achieve.
So I decided to give it a try. One of my ongoing problems is keeping the house neat. Instead of something big like, oh, “I will keep the house neat” for January I settled on “I will make the bed every morning before I go downstairs.”
I DID IT! Okay, it’s just a little thing, but its amazing how much better your bedroom looks with a neatly made bed. And by the end of the second week it hardly took a thought. I got up, hit the bathroom, and then made the bed before I got dressed. Automatically.
Today I added my February resolution: every day I will spend 15 minutes working on ‘old’ reading matter. “Old” reading are the books and magazines and printouts and clipppings and what-all I have piled up but haven’t read yet, mostly because there’s always some other interesting new book to tempt me.
So I will spend 15 minutes dealing with this stuff – I can just read my way through something (over days if need be) and then get the whatever out of the house and gone. Or I can read some of something and realize that I don’t want to read it, and get rid of it. Or I can read a magazine and keep the only bit I really want by clipping and filing it properly away. Whatever. Doesn’t matter. The point is to clear away the backlog of dusty heaps of Stuff to be Read I have piled around the house. 15 minutes a day – or longer if I get caught up in a book and enjoy it.
So – today the pile on my bedside table is now shorter by one magazine. I look forward to seeing the top of the table in a week or so. 
Anyway. Does anybody else feel like trying for monthly mini-resolutions? We could serve to keep each other accountable.