Every blog everywhere is talking about New Year’s resolutions and goal setting right now. So, since I’m trying to be a legitimate blogger I figured I better jump on the bandwagon and inspire all of you to better yourselves in the new year. The problem is I’ve never been very good at setting helpful, realistic goals for myself. There are all kinds of rules and guidelines for how to make a good goal, but following such guidelines always sounded so stifling and boring. So I’m going to take a different approach: good old fashioned stream-of-consciousness list making. Here are my goals for 2014:

1. Eat more vegetables
2. Learn to draw
3. Read more books
4. Get stuff hung on the walls of our house
5. Clean out the shed
6. Clean out the garage
7. Plant a garden (vegetable or flower)
8. Crochet some cool stuff
9. Create more products for my Etsy shop
10. Work on rebranding our web design business
11. Develop marketing materials and strategies for our web design business
12. Cook at home more often
13. Organize my craft supplies
14. Organize Charlie’s toys
15. Organize the pantry
16. Hang some curtains
17. Develop better social media strategy for work
18. Make improvements to church website
19. Practice hand lettering in designs
20. Read more to Charlie
21. Learn more about natural home remedies
22. Make and organize natural cleaning supplies
23. Set up a bird feeder in the backyard
24. Develop a consistent prayer/Bible reading habit
25. Create fun learning activities for Charlie
26. Research homeschooling methods and philosophies
27. Find more local/organic sources for food
28. Cut down on grocery budget
29. Get comfortable using Adobe Illustrator
30. Improve photography for blog and life in general
31. Organize my photos (and get some printed for display)
32. Grow readership of blog
33. Find ways to make a modest income from blogging
34. Get more sleep
35. Drink more water

Hmm….

So apparently there’s a reason stream-of-consciousness list making isn’t recommended for setting goals. There is obviously too much going on here. No wonder I constantly feel like I am not accomplishing enough.

But here is the next part of my experiment. When I’m feeling optimistic I have a theory that we all actually accomplish a lot more than we realize. It’s just that most changes and improvements happen so gradually that we don’t notice them in our day to day lives. I’ve often wondered if I just took the time to write down what I hope to achieve, that I might someday look back and realize I’ve done quite a bit of it. I think I spend so much time thinking about the things I’m not getting done that I tend to disregard any small steps of progress I make.

So rather than putting any additional pressure on myself to stick to a certain resolution for the new year, I will let this list be simply that: a written record of the things I want to improve on. I’m sure there are some that I won’t make much progress on. But it will be interesting to see in a year or so how many of these goals I’ll be able to look at and say, “Oh yeah, I did that.”