With a fresh year comes a fresh start. 2015 has just begun, and we all are determined to do something unusual this year: actually stick to our New Year’s Resolutions for once. It is something we try every year and usually succeed at until… mid-February? Okay.. early February? January 20?!
It’s time to buckle down and make 2015 a revolutionary year. Let’s recognize our goals as something worth achieving and set mini-steps along the way so that when 2016 arrives, we can be proud and ready for another new success story.

Set realistic goals  

Think daily challenges instead of something huge, like opting for an apple instead of that tempting pastry with your morning coffee, or saving $10 a day instead of a big lump of money over the course of the whole year. Checking off each of these things daily will be a powerful motivator and will be a consistent reminder of the good habits you’re building. Another daily thing you can do is schedule time for your resolution as if it is a meeting with a potential client or an important lunch with your boss. If your 45-minute workout is scheduled in your calendar alongside your other crucial tasks and you have the mentality that is something you are responsible for, you will be less likely to push it off. If you find that your resolution is not going as well as you had hoped, knock it down a level instead of giving up altogether. It’s much healthier to feel confident and comfortable with each step of your resolution than to feel overwhelmed by some insane end result. Remember, any progress is better than none!

Take advantage of technology

In keeping your resolutions, the buddy system is always a good step in the right direction, and the technology of the 21st century can be the best accountability buddy out there. Here are some of our favorite apps to keep you motivated:

• MyFitnessPal: This free calorie-counter app helps you keep track of your food intake using its huge food database and by remembering your favorites! It also helps you organize your exercises and provides progress reports to keep you motivated.
• Wunderlist: This list-making app helps keep you as organized and on-track as you could ever want to be. By setting reminder notifications and organizing tasks by different categories, you’ll never forget to finish what you started (or haven’t quite started…).
• Left to Spend: This simple app lets you decide what your ‘daily allowance’ should be by calculating your monthly income and expenses. You can type in how much you spend as you spend it, and it’ll let you know how much you have left to spend!

Take notes

We’ve recently discovered one of our favorite daily challenges for the new year (and many more to come!) Grab a stack of 365 blank notecards and write the date (without the year) on each card, and then write a fun question or daily challenge on each one. Ideas for questions/challenges are:

• What is your mission?
• Who is someone you want to get closer to?
• What do you lie about?
• What do you need to throw away?
• Call an old friend.
• Extend a helping hand to a stranger.

Then decorate a cute notecard box and keep it in a place you’ll see every day. Answer the same question (or write how you completed the challenge) every day for 5(+/-) years by writing a different year and answer on each line of the notecard. It’s a fun, cute, and free way to keep up with yourself and check your self-progress over the span of a few years. You can center your questions/challenges towards a specific resolution, or you can keep them general.

So let’s make our New Year’s resolution sticking to our resolutions this year. Think small in order to make big progress, and you’ll be surprised how much you can achieve if you keep up with it!