In 2024 and 2025, I hosted a thread on the forum for a different sort of resolution: committing to try to make a new goal each month, to harness the power of a fresh start not just in January, but throughout the year.
Personally, I’ve tried out stuff like “morning pages”, messaging a friend every day, planning my days the night before, and all sorts. Some of those goals have entered my full-time load of Beeminder goals, and some turned out to be failed experiments – but what matters is that I used the chance to harness the power of fresh starts over and over again.
So, back by popular demand (ish), here we go again! At the start of each month in 2026 I intend to set up a new goal for a new habit. I’ll deliberately set it to end at the end of the month, so if it doesn’t work well, it’s out of the way then. If a goal suits me, I’ll adjust it to keep it rolling. If it doesn’t, that’s fine too.
Want to join me?
Rules:
Post here and let me know you’re in!
At the start of each month (say before the 7th of the month), post about your new goal. If it’s private, you don’t have to share all the gory details – just whatever you’re comfortable with. You can set the goal’s end date to the last day of the month, so you don’t have to be committed to it any more than that. Everything about the goal is up to you!
Feel free to create yourself an “index post” that you’ll update to keep track of your goals/posts and make it easy to see what you’ve done overall. I’ll link to it in the “Hall of Participants”!
Share your progress updates every so often. Have you found a perfect goal? Have you struggled with something? Did something turn out to be a non-starter? Whether it’s good or bad, just share a little about the process for accountability’s sake, if that works for you.
You might want to create a goal to help you remember to make your goal at the beginning of each month…
No shame and no brow-beating! If something doesn’t work, that’s fine. If you derail, that’s fine (derailing is not failing, anyway). If you forget a month or your goal is such a bad fit you have to end it early, or a life thing gets in the way, it’s all fine. The spirit is experimentation and accountability… but flexibility is important too.
Join whenever you can or want to!
NB: This is separate to the New Year’s Resolution thread, and you don’t have to do both or anything like that – conversely, you can do both if you’re keen!
We have a horrible habit of letting boring letters and junk mail pile up near the front door. This goal intends to tackle that a few times per week, and hopefully keep things a bit tidier (and never miss appointment letters etc).
After too much Christmas splurging, I want to live more frugally in January. This do-less goal allows for only £1 a day of frivolous spending (ie, not regularly scheduled outgoings).
This month is going to be pretty stressful and with lots of unknowns, so I was looking for some small habit that would be related to self-care and wouldn’t add to overwhelm. Then my eyes fell on the package of zinc supplements that I bought a couple of weeks ago and have been failing to take consistently for the lack of a goal to remind me to. So, that’s it: zinc, set to 10 mg/ day, with the idea that I will be accruing buffer to let an occasional day when I forget slip.
For January, I am going to be Beeminding Tody points. Tody is the chore tracking app I use for our family to help us keep on top of housework. It had a point system for completing tasks, and I am going to be aiming for 11 points per day. For the sake of this goal, I will be counting points from chores that I do, and any chores that I have to repeatedly ask for help my children do.
For January, I’m doing a Do Less goal for the first time in quite some time. I want to limit myself to two desserts a day. I am not allowed to give myself extra slack by counting a small dessert as a fraction, but I’m also not ratcheting—if I have one dessert tomorrow, I can have three on Sunday.
I didn’t manage to keep it up through the year in 2025, let’s see how it goes this year! I have good reasons to believe this year may be different (as noted here cryptically).
To start with: I have a bunch of food/nutrition/ish goals (protein, calories, and now fiber). I feel like, when I am in the grocery store deciding what to buy for the week, I rarely actually consider my progress on these goals. So let’s try to fix that by bringing back an old archived goal to plan my meals for the week, once a week.
This worked really well for me last year (the significant majority of the 12 goals I made ended up being keepers), and I’m excited to try it again this year!
For January, I’m stealing @scarabaea ‘s idea and making a goal to actually take the stupid vitamin C tablets that, when taken regularly, have pretty decent evidence of actually diminishing the length of colds. The first datapoint is going to have to be buying a new container of vitamin C, because apparently mumblemumble months left on my desk next to my computer has melted them all into an inedible sludge. vitaminc – lanthala – beeminder
I think I’ve got everyone added to the list, and made all the index posts into wikis so you can keep on editing them as the year goes on and editing rights would normally fall off (something we learned last year). Let me know if I missed anyone!
Hello everyone! This is my very first post here. I’m relatively new to beeminder, so I will probably be making more than one goal a month. I’m thinking I’ll use this as a way to try out goals that are more experimental in nature. If anyone has any thoughts on how to use New Month’s Resolutions when new (and trying not to go to fast), I’d be open to hearing them!
I decided to make a goal that will hopefully push me to eat healthier meals. It works based off of a spreadsheet that gives me 1 point for having lean protein in a meal, 1 point per serving of veggies, 1 point per serving of probiotic, etc. I started it and set a very casual slope so have been lazy about putting it in, so I’m hoping that once the slope kicks up, I’ll have to be a bit more consistent with it.
Are you manually entering the result of the spreadsheet calculation into beeminder? I just ask because if you’re programming-minded, I have some kind of crappy scripts set up to automatically enter data from excel spreadsheets into beeminder, in case that’d be useful.
= archived