Resolutionary War II

I’m proud to say that, while I haven’t lived up to every New Year’s resolution I made last year, I have stuck pretty well to the most important ones. 2005 was a record-setting year in terms of making resolutions, but it was also a great success in keeping them. In the spirit of the familiar adage, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” my goals for 2006 will not deviate much from last year. However, I have learned some valuable lessons that will enable to me to finesse my ambitions. In order to do this, I had to examine three crucial aspects behind last year’s resolutions: (1) how well I succeeded in maintaining them; (2) how much sincere effort went into keeping them; and (3) the original purpose and/or intent behind making these goals.

READING

2005 goal: Read 20 books, including at least five non-fiction, three “classics,” and two “children’s” novels.
Realization of 2005 goal: 15 books started; 11 completed by Dec. 31st, including four non-fiction (seven started), two classics, and zero “children’s” novels (one started).
Adjusted goal for 2006: Read 5,000 pages, including at least 1,250 pages of non-fiction, 750 pages of “classics,” and 500 pages of “children’s” novels.

Disappointingly, I have found that most of my personal reading takes place during academic breaks—between semesters and during the summer. The time consuming nature of collegiate homework has consistently prohibited me from reading as much as I’d like, but I can definitely do better than I have. In 2005, my goal was based on the amount of books I could actually finish. This year, I will instead focus on the number of pages. There are a variety of reasons for doing this. To begin with, while page sizes can vary greatly, book size is even more inconsistent. If I should choose to read an 800-page tome, I should not consider it a threat to achieving my goal. The point is to do a fair amount of reading, and measuring that goal by the number of volumes I have read is ambiguous. Also, I do not want to time myself in such a way that I always conclude books by December 31st and wait until the New Year to begin another one. This year, for example, I have four “2005” books that I am still in the process of reading. That accounts for nearly 50% of my 2005 “failure” rate (I read nine less books than I intended). If I were basing this on pages, however, I could easily credit them toward my goal without really having to calculate anything—I’d just look at what page number I am currently on. By the way, my 2005 pages read would be somewhere around 3,500 pages—that would put me at a 70% success rate rather than 55%. That seems much better.

Still, I will not likely count books I begin but eventually abandon, because I consider those to be a loss. Obviously I would only abandon them if I felt I was getting nothing out of them, and the inherent purpose of my goal is to read things I find worthwhile. So abandoned books won’t count. And I probably won’t count those books I am still reading from 2005. While it would be fairly easy to figure this information out, it’s more of a pain than I want to deal with. And I won’t count snippets of books I read for school and whatnot. That would just prove another mess. However, if I have to read a book in its entirety for school, I see no reason not to count it. Overall, my goal is less than 14 pages per day, so it may seem relatively manageable. But, as I stated before, there are plenty of days when I don’t read anything that I would consider applicable. And so I find 5,000 pages very reasonable. (And, as you may have noticed, I kept the ratios for non-fiction, classics, and children’s novels the same, simply converting them to the new “pages read” format.)


JOURNAL WRITING

2005 goal: Write in my journal (on average) at least twice a week, not including blog entries.
Realization of 2005 goal: 34 entries, averaging .654 entries per week.
Adjusted goal for 2006: Write in my journal (on average) at least three times a week, including blog entries.

From the looks of it, I only did about 33% of the journal writing I wanted to do in 2005. But I had decided shortly into 2005 that I wanted to include blogging in my journal writing. After all, they are very much the same, and I am much more prone to blog than write in my “real” journal. Not that I ever want my blog to be my only form of journaling, but I see no reason to discount it. As such, it seems reasonable to expect at least three entries per week, or about 156 for the year. If I include blog entries for 2005, I’m just shy of reaching this three-per-week goal. However, I’m pretty happy with the amount of journaling I did in 2005, and I’m not looking to push it.


MISCELLANEOUS

Like last year, I’m not going to go into all the details of my other resolutions. Most things have gone incredibly well, though I will admit that I didn’t get to as many cultural events as I would have liked. Then again, I got married and honeymooned in Canada, so who can complain? I guess my main goals this year will deal with graduate school and married life. But until I know what to expect from the former, I’m in permanent cliffhanger mode. I continue to narrow down my list of potential graduate schools, and I think I have a firm 14 in mind now (things have changed a little bit since my last post). The general Midwest region of the United States is looking the most promising, with 10 of the 14 programs falling in at schools located either within the Central Time Zone or in Indiana (which is almost the Central Time Zone). The odd ducks are located in Washington, California, and Virginia.


So that’s my introduction to 2006. Sorry if I bored you. It’s now been a while since I’ve posted about my honeymoon, so that will be one of my more immediate resolutions—to finish the story. But until then, I hope everyone has had a delightfully splendid holiday season…