I’ve already talked about planning to use the New Year to set up a year-long goal to eat more yoghurt and keep myself to it – my December Dry Run is still ongoing for a couple more days if anyone wants to talk about the goals they’re trialling for 2024.
But at the same time, waiting for the year to change is a long time to wait for setting up new habits, so I thought for the year ahead I’d be a little more ambitious… while giving myself room to experiment, and taking advantage of calendar turning points to set markers for myself. Hence: New Month’s Resolutions!
So in 2024, at the start of each month 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 (though I expect that I’ll keep some of them rolling after the end of the month in the end).
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 can link to that in the Hall of Participants if you like!
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 my New Year’s Resolutions thread, and you don’t have to do both or anything. I’m just taking any excuse to make some little changes and get myself enthusiastic about them, as well as nail my colours to the mast for one really important goal.
such a fun idea! will have to think it over a little before i decide, but i will probably want to join at least for a few months, just to see how it goes :)
This seems like a good idea to me! I have lots of things I’d like to try out and see how they work out for me, a month is long enough to get a taste of whether they are helpful or not, but not so long I feel like I might overstretch or over commit myself.
I was thinking about doing a pages-read goal, but to be honest StoryGraph’s January challenge should have that pretty covered. Someone on one of my Discord groups was talking about doing planks, and… honestly, I should get better at those. So, tada! shanaqui/plank.
I’ll start with forearm planks, once I can hold those well, move on up, etc. The goal just tracks that I do at least one per day (no more: I can track more, but the aggday has been set to “nonzero” so I only get credit for once per day).
march: no new goal (whoatidyroom still going, fregstreme archived in march)
april: no new goal (whoatidyroom still going)
other month/s: tba
[not sure what my edit priviledges are like here, but worst case i’ll just create a second index post if too many months pass for me to be able to edit this one throughout the year.] {this was fixed by making all index posts wikis }
i want to reiterate that i very much love this idea! especially since i can easily see myself using it for not only picking up new, long-term habits, but also for finishing short-term goals (like maybe getting rid of all my non-permanent beeminder bookmarks in a month?).
so, fregstreme: this is a more extreme version of the fregs goal that i set up for the new year’s resolution—credit to the idea goes to @shanaqui and their 3 (?) different intensity levels of reading goals for this year. i thought of that again today and found it to be the perfect middle ground between testing a steeper rate of my fregs goal without committing to that for the whole year and possibly burning out / getting frustrated by it.
like fregs, fregstreme also has an autoratchet of 7 days, but the rate is 3/day, not 1/day like fregs currently has … (upped from 6/7 today, taking effect next week.) one month seems like a good testing phase for getting a feel for the numbers—is 3 still too low, is it too high, is it about right? we’ll see! starting with 7 days of initial buffer as well.
i’ve set it to end after january, and i very likely won’t let it run beyond that, especially since it requires me to enter the same data in two goals …
For January, my goal is meditation retrospective. I have noticed that the quality of my meditation sessions has started to fluctuate widely over the last couple of months. Sometimes I hit really deep states, and sometimes I am solving Problem Euler or AoC challenges in my head for the whole hour.
The purpose of this goal is to send a (at least) sixty seconds voice message to myself after each meditation session, reflecting on how focused I was and what my mind was mostly occupied with. My hope is that this will improve my awareness and intention.
It may seem counter intuitive to do it after the session, but there is already an intention setting at the beginning of the session. My idea is that knowing that I will have to justify myself to myself will subconsciously help me to try harder. We will see how it goes.
With an excess of zeal, I started my January plank goal already a couple of days ago, so I already have a bit of a feel for whether this is going to work. I’m starting from quite humble beginnings as I’ve lost a lot of fitness/strength of late (partly due to being unable to walk for a while after my operation, and then because I couldn’t get back into my routines). I’m trying to use the comments on each datapoint to write down how it went.
So far, I’ve established that I can hold the very easiest plank (on forearms + knees) for at least a minute, which was suggested as a good time to move up the difficulty. So now I’m doing forearms + toes, and I can’t hold that for a minute yet. Technically my goal only requires one plank, and doesn’t specify the length, but I dropped down onto my knees and went for a little bit longer like that.
Nice side effect: I was feeling a bit restless, which my body was interpreting as anxiety, but settling in to get my plank done burned off some of that and settled me down.
Here’s my index post. This will tie in really well with monthly reflections and seasonal priorities. Twelve months of experimenting and goal-setting! Here’s my index post:
Ok I’m in for this. I find full New Year resolutions too daunting somehow - I think it’s because I fear I will inevitably derail at some point, and I hate to feel I’ve failed at these things (I know, I know, “derailing it is nailing it!”). A month at a time sounds more like it. Bird by bird, as the great Anne L. (and Ted L., too) said.
I’m in. I didn’t originally intend to do Dry January, but it turns out that I haven’t had any alcohol this month, so I’ll make that my January resolution (and funnily enough, I can feel my resistance immediately rise now that I’ve formally committed!)
(I copied this out of my index post as I realised it probably made more sense to give myself more space to meander. I plan to post some comments after the goals reach the end of the month as well.
A goal to write entries in my DayOne journal, set to need 50 new entries over the next five weeks. I have lots of things - mostly old memories - I keep meaning to write about but am suffering from the ‘blank notebook’ problem where I feel I have to write something perfect to start with rather than just getting going. Automated with a shortcut on iOS that posts how many entries are in that journal twice a day.
For the last few years I’ve been doing a lot of my cleaning/tidying up tasks first thing in the morning in the time that was otherwise wasted. I’m now able to stay asleep until the time when I plan to work and getting up earlier to do chores by choice is no fun but neither is feeling like I ought to clean the kitchen or tidy my desk before getting to work. This goal is to try and change my habits so I leave things tidy in the evening. Set to 4/week over 5 weeks.
I kept it up through the whole month, and decided to keep it through at least the next month as well. I’ve slightly reduced the rate so I can take a rest day each week, and also think through a bit more of a training plan to increase how long I can hold a plank for.
I don’t feel like I’ve made a lot of progress: I’m still only able to hold a forearms+toes plank with reasonably good form for about 45 seconds. That said, I gave a hands-and-toes “full” plank a go, and held that for 30 seconds.
I was tempted to do another fitness type goal this month to keep ramping it up. But the one I have in mind isn’t new to me, I know exactly the rate etc I want to use and how I want to do it, so instead I’ve decided to do a morning pages goal. The idea is that more or less first thing, you sit down and handwrite three pages, dumping out all your thoughts. It’s supposed to be a creative tool, but I was reading Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, and it seemed worth trying in general for de-stressing. Also, it seems like a nice thing to help me create a morning routine and get myself off the ground a bit better.
So I’ve given it a rate of 3/day, decided I’ll try it on weekends as well, and we’ll see how it goes. I started with a couple of days of leeway since it’s not February yet, but… I’m starting already, to see if e.g. using my reMarkable feels right, or whether I want to buy a paper journal for it. I’ve already decided that the infinite scroll on my reMarkable is a no-go, but I’ll try tomorrow with creating a new page each time I reach the bottom, instead of scrolling.
I would call meditation-retro a minor success. I haven’t made any major breakthroughs, but I have been more consistent and intentional about my meditation practice achieving slightly deeper states than on average over the last six months. I will keep the goal for now.
February /freggies goal:
More fruits and vegetables in my life are probably not going to hurt. The main motivation is that the goal should force me to pack healthy snacks for work hopefully allowing me to eat them instead of the unhealthy snacks that we have there.
I have set the goal to three servings per day aiming to go for 80g per saving but I will allow myself to eyeball a fist size amount when I am not motivated to get the scale out or whatever.
I seem to not have an OG enough forum level to edit my index post which makes me very sad.
Interesting! I took for granted that we could keep editing, because I can. But of course I have workerbee-level permissions (though I’m not an admin).
Do you know anything about forum permissions, @dreev? Is there anything we can do to turn editing on for people in the long-term? Since Discourse keeps an edit trail, it seems like a low-risk thing for people who we know are in good faith to be able to do, if it’s possible…
goal didn’t last the month
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But of course I have workerbee-level permissions (though I’m not an admin).