What New Year's Resolutions Boil Down to (and how I plan to keep mine in 2015)

We're all guilty of making New Year's Resolutions and pretty much giving them up by January 31st (if not January 3rd!). It's not an easy task to make and keep a resolution, especially for an entire year. I mean, trying to immediately adopt a habit that you plan to keep for at least the next 365 days when you haven't even managed to do it for five consecutive days before that moment is a bit unrealistic.

It doesn't matter if it is finances, health, volunteering, family, career, alcohol, spiritual habits, creative pursuits, or home organization -- we all make goals right before January 1st roles around and then we rarely follow through.

New Year's Resolutions seem to boil down to three categories:
1. Things we do that we shouldn't do
2. Things we don't do that we should do
3. Things we wish we had more time to do but it does not have a huge negative effect if we don't do them

Some resolutions are one-time projects (like cleaning out the linen closet or setting up an IRA) or they could be daily goals (like reading each morning or quitting a smoking habit). One day or 100 days, each resolution can seem daunting if that particular project or goal has been haunting us for a while.

This year, I'm going to try a different approach to accomplishing goals. I'm going to work on making changes, but I'm going to focus on one thing at a time. Each month, I will take on a new challenge. Depending on the challenge, it could take me a day or take every day that month to complete. My hope is that by breaking my goals down into one month challenges, I might actually keep some of the goals at least some of the time. And the new habits I adopt for a month might stick with me to the next month, and the month after that, etc.

I won't bore you with each and every goal I have for each month. But, the ones that might seem interesting or challenging to others I will write and post about. All posts in this category will be tagged as "2015 monthly challenge".

By breaking up my goals into months, I won't be so overwhelmed tomorrow with the new year and feeling like I have to start and complete all of my goals immediately.Trying to start a dozen new habits all in one day will likely result in not doing any of them. Here's to hoping some of my 2015 resolutions are completed/become daily habits (whichever applies).

Are you setting 2015 resolutions? 

How do you plan to go about tackling these resolutions?