2017 New Year's Resolutions

A new year is upon us. Hopefully 2017 will be better than 2016 for the world at large (and more productive for myself). But for now I’m going to look at my 2017 resolutions and how well I did on last year’s resolutions.

2016 Resolution Review

Wow, I did badly on last year’s resolutions, at least as examined for the year as a whole. Let’s see if I can tease some lessons from this.

• Diet: I backslid a lot here. While I’m not quite back to the bad old days as far as weight, I am way heavier than I want to be. This year was stressful for me (due to troubles at work, stressing about the house and 2016 in general) and I let myself eat more than I should. I’ll have to work harder on this next year because things are not getting easier (though my hopes are higher for 2018).
• Write Every Day: I achieved mixed results here. I had some bad weeks and good months. I was fairly steady for the first third of the year, slowly scaling up my goals from 100 words a day to 400. Then I think pushed my goals too high and the whole project became too daunting to me. At the same time while it was working, it didn’t help me (much) work on projects outside of the blog.
• Tumblr Posts: I kept at this for a couple of months but splitting my attention on social media just didn’t work for me. I need to look at automating this somehow.
• New Gaming Group: The big success of this year. I have two new local players and we are well into our second campaign.

New (or Renewed) 2017 Resolutions

• Diet & Exercise: Failure is not a reason to give up on a goal. I follow a lot of what John Green does and he and friend are doing a new Youtube channel focusing on the both of them working to improve their health. I plan to follow along as best I can and see if I can’t slim back down to a healthy weight.
• Write Every Day: Again, failure is not the end. But no more word goals this time (well okay maybe 250 words a day but I’m not forcing myself to go higher). Also I want to write some personal (non-gaming) fiction/non-fiction each week.
• Watch More Movies: Not in the theater unfortunately, that’s hard to do with two small children. But after they go to sleep, I want to catch up on all the great films coming out around the world. And watch fewer CW shows.

Final Note

I’m reducing my blog schedule to once a week (Wednesdays) for the foreseeable future. My daughter is arriving a few weeks and I expect that to absorb all my time for a month or more. Perhaps once my kids become more independent, I’ll be able to devote more energy to this project. Combined with the goals above however I hope I’ll have some larger writing projects to show off in the future.