Making a Good Resolution

15 Minute Classics started out as more or less a New Years resolution to do the 15MAD challenge. This year, I kind of flailed around (I didn't officially set a resolution until mid January). With two days left in the year, I figured I'd take a minute to talk about how they went, what I think makes a good resolution, and set some up for next year.

This year's resolutions:

    Get my Chess ELO up to 1500- That was completely insane. No way it was going up that much. I wound up playing on a ton of different platforms, so I don't even know what my "real" rating is at this point. Lesson: Make part of your goal something you can do every day (or x times a week) instead of a single big milestone.

    "Get back to an exercise routine"- Too vague, but I did do at least some kind of stretching/light aerobics just about every day this year. Lesson: Be specific!

    I did keep the blog every day, which wasn't an official goal, but cool.

    And I did memorize two speeches, and I can still mostly remember them!

    There's all kinds of goal setting strategies out there, but my advice for setting a resolution (or any kind of longer term goal like this) can be summed up as, "Why, What, How"

Why: Why are you pursuing a goal/resolution. This is some kind of long term, meaningful goal. For example, when I did the 15MAD, I was trying to round out parts of my education I felt like I missed.

What: What is the thing(s) you're going to do in order to attain that goal? For me, it was reading the 5FSOB.

How: How are you going to make progress on the goal? For me, it was reading almost every day and blogging about it.

It's sometimes helpful to think of these as small, medium, and large goals. If your big goal (something that takes at least a month) is to be able to have a cool speech memorized to say at parties, then your medium goal (something that takes a week or two) might be to pick two or three speeches to work on, and your small goal (something you can do most days) might be to read it out loud or write it out or something.

All that brings me to this years goals:

1. I lost about 10 pounds last year, mostly in the summer. Long term, I'd like to get to an "officially healthy" weight, which would be about 50 more pounds for me. This year, I think I'll go for 25. That's a step up, but still feels pretty doable at ~1/2 a pound on an average week. To do that, I'm going to commit to (at a minimum) doing at least 10 minutes of some kind of workout/stretch a day.

2. Doing the blog has continued to help expose me to different things, grow, and be a good way to reflect. I'm going to keep the current daily posts, at least 4 in the "core" blog a week. I'm going to tweak that a little by giving the option to add a 4th (THE LAST ONE, TOTALLY!) blog and counting that. 

2a? I'm going to write at least 500 words of fiction a day.

3. I enjoyed the memorization, so I'm going to commit to memorizing at least one speech, poem, etc. a month. Something I want to consider is how I'll keep them memorized. I would say I'm at about 80 or 90% on the stuff I memorized earlier this year.

I thought about doing a Chess goal again, but it was kind of a mess this year, and I feel like those 3 put enough on my plate. I'll still play and do puzzles, and I might talk about it from time to time, but no official goal right now.