My new year goals for 2022 have taken me a bit longer than planned but better late than never I say.

I have seen a distinct lack of ‘New Year’s Resolutions’ on social media at the start of this year- I think that’s brilliant and here’s why.

From my own experience New Year’s Resolutions are easily broken which results in an instant feeling of failure and potential self-sabotage. For example, as a preteen I remember being in a restaurant stating that I wanted to have more prominent cheekbones. No sooner than I had announced this, somebody reminded me that we were in a restaurant and that I was literally sat eating chocolate marble cake with lashings of heavy cream. It would have been funny if I’d been old enough to spot the irony. Instead, it created a f*ck it moment which just made me want to eat more of the same. My instant failure made me want to punish myself and I believe that the concept of New Years’ Resolutions do the same. The rules are so stringent that it sets us up to fail. Take me for instance on this New Year’s Eve. I had planned to stop ordering take-aways- when my chicken kebab arrived at 11.55pm on the dot, five minutes before midnight. Had it been a resolution, I would have already failed, however since it was a rolling goal that I gave myself to work towards, I felt no disappointment with myself or any negative emotion associated with failure.

Happily, I have seen people list their goals without so much as the dreaded ‘R’ word around. It seems that people have grasped the concept that we need to go easy on ourselves by setting longer term attainable goals that we can work on continuously.

So onto some of my new year goals for this year:

Write more short stories

This is probably one of my favourite prose forms to write in. It doesn’t require the same planning, tenacity and time investment as a novel but the indulgence of just pouring over the pages is just as rewarding. I definitely plan to write more of these this year.

Get back into sending submissions

Any writer should know by now that rejection is about as normal the sun rising in the morning. It will happen and it will happen again and again. It is part and parcel of the process. It’s really important to understand this and can actually keep you motivated to keep going.

Re-edit my novel (protagonist name change)

I completed my first novel a long time ago. Then I dropped it for some creative writing side projects- bad idea in stalling on this. Some time has gone by now and the name of my protagonist just won’t have the effect that it would have had I acted sooner. Lesson learned.

Set up an activity diary

I would like to be more strategic with how I list and plan activities.

Less time on social media

What can I say? Like many people, I really need to cut down on time spent scrolling aimlessly through random feeds. This one is so hard though!

Stay on a low sugar diet

I recently wrote about how I cut most artificial sugar out of my diet.

What are some of your main new year goals for the year? Let me know in the comments below.