Ringing in the changes and whether to make New Year Resolutions for 2019 (spoiler: I did)

Well that was fun!  I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the last few weeks and I hope all you had a splendid festive season. Since I put up my last post I have been indulging in everything that Christmas and New Year cliches required.

Parties have been hosted and attended. Wine has been mulled, Prosecco has been chilled and ales have been quaffed. Trees have been dressed, wreaths woven and, presents exchanged. Family has stayed and arguments avoided. Carols have been sung badly but enthusiastically. Pigs were wrapped in blankets, puddings were set alight and, our goose was well and truly cooked. (By the way, not only is goose delicious the fat makes the absolutely best roasties).

Heck, I even made it to a service at the local church on Christmas Eve

I have to confess that in that time I have barely been online. I’ve only checked to see if any comments need moderating on here and glanced through twitter a few times.  Overall though my normal practise of spending evenings reading blogs and twitter has been tossed out of the window.

Instead I’ve spent the last two days teaching myself how to do this because…well why not?

But the holidays are behind us and I’m just back at work.  That means it’s a great time to look forward to the year that’s just started.

To resolve or not to resolve

Jumping back online it looks like the thing to do is to share your resolutions for the year. Now, I’ve always been a bit sceptical of New Year resolutions. The way I see it, if I want to commit to something I should just get on with it.  This blog is a good example. I’ve been dithering about it for years and then in October I decided to just crack on.

Another example of that is my sleep experiment. After the articles that I read I didn’t want to wait before fixing that. The thing about that though is that something about being accountable to my blog kept me on the straight and narrow.  I’ll give a proper update shortly but I reckon I’m averaging an extra 30 mins of sleep every day. It feels amazing.

Given the success of that accountability I’m interested to see if that will also happen with other goals.

The other aspect here is that I’m a big believer in the idea that you get what you measure.  I realise that if you look at that against my financial rules of thumb there may be a disconnect. What I would say to that is that it’s just about compatible.  Mostly because I don’t have a specific financial target that I am shooting for at this stage.

The only financial target that I had was to pay off my mortgage, which I did last year.  Beyond that I’m dependent on my children. More specifically on the decision about whether they should go to private school at some point. [I’ll say again that I know how privileged we are to have that choice.] That’s such a material swing factor in my finances that I can’t make specific financial plans until that resolves.  In the meantime my rules allow me to keep good financial hygiene.

So, in the spirit of seeing if accountability and measurement make a difference here are my financial, health, spirit and blog resolutions for the year.

Financial resolutions.

Financial goals are my easiest targets. As I said above I want to keep doing what I am doing. I’ll keep on maxing out my employers matched pension contributions, continue to autosave into my ISA, continue to test my direct debit bills as they come up to renewal etc.

In terms of my earnings I have no plans to change my job.  I enjoy it and I have a good work-life balance.  While I’ll continue to look for a suitable side hustle I’m not expecting much on that front. I’ll write more about this at some point but my basic view is that I can totally see the value in diversified income streams. But, I’m going to struggle to get motivated enough to spend my free time on something is less enjoyable and worse paid than my day job.

The two things that I think that I’m going to look into this year are Junior ISAs and self invested pensions for my kids, and (possibly) a full scrub of my direct debits.  To be honest though those are less resolutions than just things that it would be sensible to do at some point.

Health resolutions

The big one for me this year is about getting back to a healthy weight. I tipped over 17 st as of the first of January.

Ouch.

That’s not good at all.

My goal is to get to 13 st by the end of the year. I realise that sounds excessive – it’s just under a quarter of my current weight. But, it’s around what I was at six/seven years ago so I’m not trying to recreate some kind of impossible image from my teenage years.  Too many reasons for why I think my weight’s gone up to go into now – but the key thing is to try to reverse it.

As I touched on earlier my sleep experiment is going jolly well so I definitely want to lock that in for the year. My goal is to average over six hours and thirty minutes of sleep per day over an average week. To do that I’m going to try to stick to stepping away from screens 30 minutes before I go to bed and also to try to give myself that “eight hour window of opportunity to sleep” every night.

Not directly related to weight loss is to try to find a gym routine that works for me. I actually quite like going to the gym but I’ve not found something that a) doesn’t mean I lose out on sleep, b) takes less than 90 minutes out of my day, and c) I don’t abandon when things get busy. I’m not going to lock this down to something specific at the moment as I there’s no point until I know what that routine is.  It’s on the list though so it’s an itch I have to scratch eventually.

That notwithstanding I want to continue to get regular steps in and so I want to take 4,500,000 steps in 2019.  That’s a bit over my current target of 12,000 steps per day so it is a modest step forward.

I should say though that I’m very aware that “lose weight-exercise more” is the classic New Year resolution. It’s the one that gets ditched half way through January. I have no idea if I’ll be the same – but let’s see!

Spirit resolutions

Now this category is going to be the most fun. This is basically my hobbies and friends bit.  It’s what I’m going to do for fun, but I’m going to track it to make sure that I actually do it.

So in 2019 I want to read at least 26 books i.e. average one every fortnight. I also want to watch at least 12 films either on DVD or at the cinema – I love movies but I’ve fallen a bit out of the habit lately so I want to get back to it. Over the course of the year I want to go to the theatre at least three times to see a play, musical or show of some sort. Finally I want to make sure that I meet up with friends or family (outside of the family I live with) at least once a month – I am always amazed at how quickly the weeks can rush by without seeing people.

Blog resolutions

I wasn’t going to put anything in on the meta-topic of what I want to do with this blog but I thought that I may as well. If I wanted to just do this for my own perusal I would write a personal journal but I’ve chosen to put this out there.  Therefore, I don’t think it’s a bad idea to set a goal to encourage some people read this thing.

I’m far too new at this to have any idea of what normal / good/ realistic looks like but there goes.  On inputs I would like to make sure I publish at least 50 posts during 2019.  I’m then aiming to end the year with 1000 page views per month (I’ve got about 2,600 in total since I started in October). On social media side I’d like to get 500 twitter followers (I’m just under 150 now).

As I say though I have no idea if that is ambitious or unambitious. It’s certainly arbitrary. It doesn’t matter really but it will be interesting to see where this ends up.

What next?

Well if I’m going to use his blog to be accountable then I should be accountable. My intention will be for my first post every month to be an update and commentary on where I am. Actually, I’m quite excited to see where I end up in a year’s time. I’m sure that there will be some that I hit and some that I miss.  That fine.  I’m almost more interested in the process of why I manage to hit or miss any of them.

I appreciate there are far too many resolutions but I’m OK with that. A lot of these are about healthy habits that I would appreciate having in my life all of the time. I hope that they become part of my life rather than a target to hit then forget. The process of forcing myself to write it down makes it more real and locks it into something specific. It also gives me a framework to measure and check where I’ve got to.

To be honest the only one that I really want to nail is the weight one. It doesn’t fit either with how I see myself and who I want to be.

Let’s see where I end up!

Thoughts?

I’d love to hear if you’ve got any resolutions for the year. If you’ve blogged about them then please feel free to leave a link in the comments.

Even more interestingly I would love to hear about any reflections you may have on why you succeeded or not in the past.

Also it would be great to hear your thoughts about my blog targets. Like I said, I’m pretty clueless on this so any views gratefully received!