New Year, New Decade, New Goals

I'll admit it, I've been in denial about this whole New Year / New Decade thing. Resolutions freak me out. Sure, I may have all these great intentions but inevitably, I can't sustain the changes for long and I give up after a few weeks (or days). In recent years, I've given up on resolutions altogether. After all, if I'm just going to give up on them, might as well not do them in the first place and save myself from all that added guilt.

Then I read the latest post (Hello, New Year) by fellow writer and blogger, Ghenet, and it inspired me. So this year instead of making resolutions, I will set a few specific goals. Goals are good. I can do goals. They're specific. Compact. Manageable.

Goals for 2010:

• Yarn Diet. Yes, it's that time of year when I need to stop acquiring more yarn than I can knit. Yarn diet works on one simple principle: before I'm allowed to get new yarn, I must complete a project of equal size and scope and either gift the item or find room for it in my closet. Easy right? Considering I have upwards of a dozen half-finished projects right now, I'm not sure "easy" is the right word.
• Writing. The idea is to start by writing 500 words of something every day. Once this starts to feel easy, I'll gradually increase the number by 100 words until I've come to 2,000 per day (which is the actual goal).
  
• Blogging. This blog needs a schedule. The idea of "blogging whenever I can" makes it too easy for me to procrastinate and leave the blogging for tomorrow. I need figure out a schedule and give myself deadlines so that my posting stops being so erratic.
• Healthy Decisions. I'm resorting to self-bribery on this one. I know myself and I'm fully aware that eating right and exercising is not going to happen if I do it just for the sake of "being healthy." So from now on, every time I make a healthy decision (choose a healthy food option, go to the gym or running, walk instead of taking the subway, etc.) I can take one coin from my loose change and put it in my piggy bank. This bank is my yarn fund and it trumps the yarn diet.
  

Notice how nowhere in the above goals do I mention my thesis. Let's just say the thesis situation is a bit of a mess right now and I'd rather not think about it at the moment. I may have gotten over my New Year's denial, but I'm still very much in thesis denial.

But that's the point of these New Year's goals after all; I only need to worry about one thing at a time.