This year has been a tough year in a lot of ways and I’m sure it’s not just me who will be glad to see the back of this year at midnight tonight.

But what of the future?  I have a few goals for 2017, but haven’t set myself any resolutions at this point. I actually tend not to even think about New Year’s resolutions until the start of the new year, if I make any at all. I would rather think in terms of broader goal-setting and trying to improve habits than setting impossible hurdles up for myself with the inevitable result of feeling bad for not managing to keep jumping over them. That said, I did start out on one of these schemes last year, with a rare NY resolution which required completing a daily task. I started to flag in about mid February and by the end of March it was all over with a big guilt trip. The main reason for not picking it up again, apart from it taking longer each day than I’d been led to believe, was because I would see long lists of dates in the past with unfinished tasks every time I looked at it. Looking back, I feel pleased with myself that I made it beyond the first few weeks.

So, instead of resolutions as such, I think I’ll be thinking for a little while in January about what I want to achieve next year and how I might go about it. Sometimes plotting and scheming isn’t the best way to get started though – it can be easier to just write a list of specific things that need doing and then attack them in an order that makes some sort of sense. You can spend too long thinking and not enough time doing…

I’d be interested to hear how readers of this blog approach New Year: Do you have any strategies you’ve used for making or keeping resolutions? Do you even make them, or do you do something else to mark the passing of the old year and look forward into the new one?