The tale of the missing resolutions

by Elisa on January 7, 2011

By now, I must be the only blogger in the whole blogosphere who hasn’t posted her New Year’s resolutions.

Thing is, I have been sick. It started on New Year’s day and just got progressively worse before it started slowly getting a little better. If I had written any posts in the past week, my only resolution would have been to finally get rid of the flu, and my only outfit of the week would have been my pjs.

Add to that the fact that my dishwasher is on the fritz, and the first week of my year was… well, let’s just say it’s the first time I’m hoping that the Italian adage “What you do on the first of the year, you’ll do the whole year” doesn’t hold true. Otherwise I will be spending my year in my pjs, buried in dirty dishes, sporting serious under-eye circles and a voice that sounds like I’ve been smoking for 50 years. Not a very attractive package.

As I started getting better, I realized I needed to come up with my resolutions. (I had realized it before, but somehow the fever made me care less.)

How to go about it? Gretchen Rubin likes to pick a word to represent what you want to achieve that year. (hmmmm…. one word? Me? Right, because I am known for being concise); or I could do what Cathy Alter did in Up for Renewal and spend each month following the advice of an article in one the leading women’s magazines. (Which actually sounds like fun. At least until I get to SELF’s turn and I have to do something that involves a lot of running.)

Truth is, I don’t know if the classic resolutions work for me. I get bored quickly (for those who like psycho-babble, I have a short attention span) and the chance of me focusing on the same things for a whole year are slim at best. And to follow my own advice, I should pick a few good ones instead of writing a gigantic list, which is really what makes New Year resolutions so popular… and so useless.

Each year, when the time comes, we think about what we’d like to accomplish in the coming year, and then proceed to write a loooong list of things that are aligned with our goal to be skinnier, smarter, richer, better looking, more organized, more successful, and basically someone who barely resembles our current self. So somehow we ask ourselves to accomplish in a year what we haven’t accomplished in the 20 or 30 years before it.

What to do instead? It’s hard to pick just a few things to stick with the entire year, especially since we can’t predict if and how things will change in the next 365 (or in my case of belated resolutions, 359) days.

Which is why I have decided to use my short attention span to my advantage, and take it on a monthly basis. 30 days are a lot less overwhelming than 365 so I will be reassessing things and setting new goals every month. Instead of New Year’s resolutions, I will do New Month’s resolutions.

I think I’m onto something.

What do you think? Is it a good idea, or is it the fever talking?