Happy new year! I hope everyone’s had a good holiday season – I’m enjoying my time off and haven’t eaten too many boxes of chocolates. (Roast dinners, however, are a totally different thing). I’m quite glad to see an end to 2013 – it didn’t feel like a very good year for many of us, but hopefully, things are lookup up for all of us!
Blogging is brilliant at keeping you accountable – I’ve blogged my new years resolutions for the past five years (2013, 2012, 2011, 2010 and 2009) – it’s a lot easier to remind yourself of them on a blog than if you write them in a random notebook or diary somewhere.
So how did I do with last years resolutions?
- SIDE PROJECTS DAMN IT – heh. So when I wrote that resolution, I was in the middle of writing an eBook about blogging. I thought that it would be a case of writing everything I know down, putting it on Amazon, and sitting back with a brew, waiting for the money to roll in. I knew that I wanted to keep it updated, and I still do want to update it on a fairly regular basis, but I realised that a website would be a much better way to keep bloggers updated – so in May, I launched Bonjour, Blogger! I’ve really loved working on that site, even when I feel exhausted by it all!
- Read less blogs – I did so well at this at first! I took the opportunity of Google Reader dying (I’m still sad about that, you know.) to clear out the blogs I couldn’t bear for whatever reasons, but with the Saturday Summary feature on Bonjour, Blogger!, I needed to read more blogs, and my Bloglovin’ has crept back up. I am a lot less likely to stay subscribed to blogs I skip over or get annoyed at, so a partial win.
- Socialising – I don’t feel like I’ve seen more bloggers this year, but I’ve seen the same ones more often – and I love that!
- Exercise – In June, I started having some pretty ridiculous issues with my back, and exercising has fallen to the wayside – but let’s not pretend I was doing so well before that. Moving away from my gym and getting equipment at home meant I am less motivated to get on with it. Sigh.
- Finding Joy – I have been awful at this one. (Sorry Mia!) It’s been difficult to find the joy for most of this year, but I want to do better!
And for 2014?
- To become more confident when talking about myself – and by extension, Bonjour, Blogger!. I find myself shuffling my feet and looking down (metaphorically) when people ask about BB. I need to talk it up more!
- To hold a few blogger events – plans are afoot for this already, but I’m hoping to do something at least every other month! Ambitious? Probably.
- To do some public speaking – Working in accounts, you don’t get to see the outside world very much. On the rare occasions that I have needed to talk to a large group, I find I end up mumbling into the microphone and babbling. Need to get better at this – and I guess practice is the only way!
- Exercise! – not just getting on the cross trainer, or cycling, but walking more (especially with the dogs!). I have managed to maintain my weight loss from last year, but there’s still a way to go to my original goal.
- To not abandon ceriselle.org so much! – I’m so sorry, little website. I feel so bad that I’ve abandoned you for the new shiny site over there.
- To organise my finances better – The original version of this resolution said to use my Xero account more to classify my outgoings, but they just sent me a message saying the personal feature is shutting down the year, annoyingly! Any recommendations of some thing similar for a personal user that will bring in all transactions automatically?
If you see me not doing any of these, do poke me!
Want to see older resolutions posts? I’ve been writing these since 2009, and you can find them all here
Is Mint.com available in the UK, for finance tracking?
Do an Ignite talk about blogging! They’re really fun and the audience tend to be good sorts of people. Mr Bristol Culture goes a lot – not sure if he regards himself as a blogger these days but yeah. I’d come and cheer you on / buy you a glass of wine :-)