The pros of setting New Year’s resolutions

I am a firm believer that, if we want something to happen, WE NEED TO WORK FOR IT. Just waiting for things to go the way you want them with no effort from your side is really not smart. That’s why we are still behind work, maybe fat, not able to save enough etc. Every change we have to make needs to be made and not just planned. While I do think that we need to improve on ourselves immediately and not wait for some special occasion to do it.

Yesterday you said tomorrow

Really loved this ‘saying’. It shows exactly how most of us function. We do understand there’s something wrong with how we work or live our life, but we still just plan on making the changes. ‘I’ll stop smoking on my birthday‘, ‘I’ll start dieting from Monday‘, ‘I plan on saving more money next year‘.

STOP!

Stop making excuses and postpone. If you want to stop smoking, do it now. I know people who have quit cold turkey (my partner is one of them) and they’re doing fine, thanks for asking. If you need to lose weight, start a food journal and try to work out. If you spend like crazy, start saving a bit of money NOW. If you’re an airhead like I am and need to be better organized, do it from this moment, if you have a hectic sleeping schedule, go to sleep earlier TONIGHT and try to not waste time anymore, when you could rest.

I was able to do many things in the past 3 years just because I set my mind to it. And I started making changes the moment I realized my ways are really wrong.

Still, nothing like a nice list of New Year’s resolutions. So, just as many of you do it, I have my own list I try to put down in writing each year.

While we do change bits and pieces each day (or at least we should), the new year always allows us to look at the past 12 months and see how we did. It’s like a business audit if you will, we spend few minutes with ourselves and try to understand what our ‘performance’ were, if we’re ‘bankrupt’ or ran a ‘lucrative business’.

For 2012 my list looked something like this:

• earn a set amount each month. Save 15%. Be more responsible with my money, stop spending on crap I don’t need.
• become debt free
• have eye surgery
• do some serious renovations at our apartment
• learn to delegate in my business
• be better organized and more efficient in my work
• organize my site network, diversify my money making options

What I accomplished:

1. Earned almost as much as I had my mind set to. And that happened with traveling 7 months out of 12. I am very pleased so far and I hope 2013 will be at least as good as this year was. Didn’t save 15%, but I’m not too far anyway. If it was to find excuses, I’d say we did travel a lot and that is VERY costly. No, I don’t regret it though, spending time in Spain in January with my sister in law and 6 months in NYC with our dear friends were the HIGHLIGHTS of this year. I am happy we made enough money to support our travels.

I am still struggling to spend less money and it starts working. I am saving more than I ever did before, can even look calmly at something I’d want to buy and, even if I could afford it, understand that it’s not something I need. So I just smile and move on. I still need to put my act together, but I’ve never been as responsible as now in my life.

2. Yes, since March I AM DEBT FREE. You have no idea how cool this feels. Was able to finish my car payments and, after 4 long and hard years I have finally said goodby to my monthly payments. I do plan on staying far from any loans in the future, so I’ll use the bank to save my money and make payments.

3. Have done this too, right before we left to NYC. It’s been a pretty good experience (even if normally surgery is not too pleasant). I am happy to have ‘cleared’ this off my schedule, since I’ve postponed it for years.

4. This is the biggest ‘failure’ this year. Wasn’t able to do any work at our apartment, since I was away for all that time. I do hope to make it up to my parents this year.

5. I am still not good with delegating. But I did get myself a wonderful team of editors and learned to appreciate their hard work and understand that, if they don’t always do it ‘my’ way, their way is actually great. This blog for instance is doing well because few very talented people have really pushed some excellent content. So yes, you can let other people help you and it will make it all easier.

6.  I am not a ‘machine’ and I do think some form of ADD is not hard to diagnose in my case. But still I’ve made serious improvements and the fact 2012 was my BEST year in business is not just a mistake. I am trying to better plan my work and focus more, let’s hope I can do an even better job in 2013.

7. My site network is established now. One of the best things I did in 2012 was set TopAdmin, which helped me meet so many wonderful webmasters. It’s been a pleasure working on that site and it’s surely gonna be one of my favourites in the next months. I am currently working at 3 more projects (they’ll be released in the following weeks) and then just focus at consolidating the network.

Ready for 2013?

For this year we’re about to start I wan to keep on doing what I’ve done in 2012. I have set myself the desired amount of money I plan on earning and will try to save a THIRD until the next December 31. It won’t be easy, especially with all the stuff I will probably need to work on, not to mention that there’s always something you never planned happening (sure, bad things, we never complain about good things happening unplanned :)), but I hope I’ll make it.

We’ll probably meet the next year here to share what our New Year’s resolutions were and how much we achieved.

So, nothing more to say than: HAPPY NEW YEAR. Thank you for visiting this blog, thank you for writing for us, hope you’ll have a wonderful year. Feel free to share your resolutions with us, so that by the same time next year we’ll be able to celebrate 12 months of success.