Problems are for Solving

People often make resolutions, and rarely keep them. It’s kind of sad, and I’ve hesitated to make any in past years because of my previous lack of consistency in keeping them.

This year, though, I’m going to try again. And by God’s grace, these should be attainable.

1. Be more consistent in my time with family worship than last year. I ended 2008 much better than it began, but there is still room for improvement. I want to not only be more consistent but more deliberate in how the time is spent, so that the children (and the adults!) get more out of it and it’s not just a routine.
2. Be more consistent in my exercising. I had some good months in 2008, and it was certainly better than 2007, but I want to get in at least 10 workouts *every month* in 2009. It’s an attainable goal. More is better, but I want to hit it every month rather than 20 in January and then miss March.
3. Read twelve books. I’ve pared down my blog reading of late, and may continue to purge my RSS feeds. I thought about having this be “read one book every month” but I would rather just get some books read. I may do better than twelve, but my reading habits have been poor in 2008 and so I want to just finish a few more books this year.
4. More writing. Not necessarily blog posts, but I want to do more writing than I did last year. Including letter writing–I want to get back to sitting down with a pen and paper and write people I don’t usually communicate with, and to do it outside of the quick, painless email system. I know I should have something concrete here, but I don’t know what I want to set as a realistic goal.
5. More hospitality. I’ve used my travel schedule as an excuse for not having people over so much this last year, but I want to have at least 10 families over for dinner this year that we’ve never had over before, or at least who haven’t been in my home since 2006.
6. More time with the family. As of January 1, I have 30 days of vacation time and 38 days of personal time. I would like to actually take some of that off this year and use more vacation time for personal use than I did last year. It may be hard around travel, but it needs to be a priority and I’ll have to do a better job of delegating so that it can happen. So concretely, the goal is to start next year with fewer vacation days saved up than this year, by at least 5. That means I need to take off at least 33 days this year. Seems like that should be easy, but it won’t.

I think these are reasonable goals, but the year will show me. I’ll try to post updates as to how I’m doing on all six of these every month or so.

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