Yesterday I worked my second last shift ever for my old employer. I stayed on weekend shifts after I left to help out and probably did so a little longer than I intended. Uni starts in March and I decided I had to pull the plug so I could have some time off in February.

Normally the weekend shifts can be done at home, but much to my dismay, there was an issue connecting to a server and I had to go into the office.

The office itself is lovely, but stifling on the weekends when there’s no air conditioning and the shifts are more on-call than flat-out, so I had eight hours to kill and there’s only so many gratuitous photos of Josh that I could print out and stick to his monitor as a Monday morning surprise.

Instead I stared thinking about my goals for this year and narrowed them down to about five. Then I thought about how I motivate myself. I surprised myself by realising I am not rewards-based because I reward myself for everything. Get out of bed? Reward! Go to bed at the end of the day? Reward!

Delilah and I are both very treat-oriented, but not necessarily treat-motivated. We are over-treated.

The only thing that’s ever worked for me is the “Seinfeld Productivity Secret“. Give me something to cross off or colour in and I’m all about doing that.

I had a pretty specific idea about what I wanted it to look like so I bought PDFs of a goal planner and a weekly/monthly planner from etsy, tweaked them a little bit and created a book.

I wrote down the five things I want to do and why, stuck a motivational picture in there and then listed all the things I needed to do to achieve them all.

When I got home, I stuck a monthly planner for the goals that need me to do something almost daily up on a wall and each night, I’ll colour the day in if I did what I needed to!

There’s one up for doing the C25K again and another for guitar practice. It’s already made a difference because guitar practice is something I just forget until the Sunday night before a lesson, between work and walking the dog and dinner and a million other nightly things, but now there’s a big ol’ reminder there.

Another interesting this was looking through my old photos for the motivational picture for the C25K and weight goals.

I’ve had a really bumpy few years with weight. First I was chubby, then I lost a huge amount when the side effect of one of my medications was almost complete appetite loss, then my thyroid killed itself and a side effect was extreme weight gain and then the mental side effect of that was a compulsion to eat all of the snacks because why not?

I wanted to find something realistic, and I found this picture from almost exactly two years ago:

This was post-no appetite, pre-thyroid.

I laughed when I saw it because I remember this outfit well. I called it my space mechanic outfit, like Kaylee from Firefly.

I also thought I was really progressive wearing it because I’d started gaining some weight back and thought I was too big to be wearing shorts.

I am perhaps not the best judge of my own appearance.

I’m not sure how much I’ll blog about goals here because I’m typically pretty bad at keeping resolutions or remembering to track them.

We’ll see.

Random Internet People: “New Year’s resolutions are dumb!”

Me: “I think having resolutions are a good idea!”

RIP: “Yeah but why wait for the start of a new year? Why not just start today? Or tomorrow?”

Me: “That would be fine, as would having them start on the first of January!”

RIP: “No, that would be dumb.”

Me: “Do you have any?”

RIP: “Hell no!”

Me: “I have a few. I’m going to finish the C25K. What do you think about that?”

RIP: ” … nothing.”

Me: “Aren’t you angry?”

RIP: “No?”

Me: “But I’m starting on January 1, not today or tomorrow!” *makes spooky ghost fingers*

RIP: “I don’t care what you do.”

Me: “But you think I’m dumb, right?”

RIP: “I don’t know, shut up okay?”

+++

I like New Year’s resolutions and I make them every year. Maybe one for this year will be finding out if ‘New Year’s’ is always capitalised, because I’m really not sure about that one.

I have discussed this with my psychologist before. Sure, it’s not necessarily healthy to do things like eat 14 tubs of ice cream every day until June 26th and then think to yourself, ‘Oh well! I don’t need to worry about stopping that until January 1st!’ but for a lot of people a new year brings new circumstances and things shift and change.

For me, the new year brings the start of a four day working week, which frees me up to do stuff like plan out a whole month of running. University is also something new, so I’ll need to shift things around to fit that in.

This time of year also means a lot of people are on holidays. For me that means reestablishing contact with people I haven’t seen much of in the whirlpool of 2014. It means having time to get back into reading books for book club (another resolution), catching up with Nic and learning about riding in Sydney (another resolution).

So while Random Internet People are squawking into the void of social media about how much they hate New Year’s resolutions (the capitalisation is starting to feel less and less correct here), as far as me and mine go? At the end of the year, maybe I’ll be a fitter, more reliable book club attendee with a kickass grade point average. a lady who cycles to work! Maybe I won’t be any of those things!

The only thing for certain is naysayers will always be shouting into the void and it doesn’t make a difference to me (resolutions on the other hand …).

Edit: Also? Always question people who try and tell you that something positive you’re doing for yourself is dumb. Ask yourself why, if it has no impact on them at all, they need to try so hard to make you feel bad about your choices. The answer is always interesting and almost all the time, never about you.