January is often treated as a month for fresh starts, ambitious plans and New Year’s resolutions. I have never been especially good at that last one. Making a formal resolution is pretty much the best way to guarantee I won’t accomplish whatever I have resolved to do.
Why New Year’s resolutions don’t work for me
Personally, I think January is a good time to regain some calm after the holiday season—or at least return to trying to be calm.
Still, I have never been especially good at making resolutions. It is pretty much the best way to guarantee I won’t accomplish whatever I have resolved to do.
What I have done instead is make a list of things I want to accomplish during the year. Yes, I realise this may be a matter of semantics, but let me have this one.
I’m quite aware I probably won’t be able to accomplish everything by the end of December, but that’s okay. The fact that I’ve made a list is a big enough deal for the woman who rarely makes a grocery list and routinely ends up forgetting oat milk or peanut butter.
Tackling my book and yarn stashes
The list began during a phone conversation with a friend. Audiobooks had already changed the way I consumed books, but my Kindle purchases were creating an entirely different backlog. During this conversation, I mentioned my habit of buying books for my Kindle but only reading the most recently added ones. The result was a growing backlog of books I had paid for but never read.
I then compared those books to my yarn stash. I have a long-running relationship with knitting, but if you don’t know what a yarn stash is, this article does a fair job of explaining it. I take exception to the suggestion that it should be hidden from one’s significant other, but that is a discussion for another time.
The book spreadsheet lists all the unread books on my Kindle in the order I purchased them. It also has one checkbox for whether each book is on my Goodreads list—they all are now—and another for when I finish reading it. The idea is to read the books in order, while any new purchases go at the bottom of the list.
The spreadsheets did not magically eliminate either stash, but they made both feel more manageable. That was more useful than making a resolution I would abandon by February.
After that conversation, I was determined to do something about both my book stash and my yarn stash, so the list was born — as were two spreadsheets.
Instead of making New Year’s resolutions, I now create a flexible to-do list for the year. Maybe that really is just a collection of resolutions wearing a different outfit. Still, it feels less rigid and far less intimidating. I can add to it, move things around and accept that not everything will be finished by December. For me, that makes it much more useful.
