I think I mentioned last week that after I wrote my goals last year, I didn’t look at them again until I was doing my review of the year. That’s how goals go for me pretty often. I have a hard time sticking to them and keeping track of them.

I got a shiny new planner this week (inspired by a friend’s planner purchase), and I’m using it to try to better track my progress on my goals. This is not the first time I’ve tried using a planner to do this (I have a bit of a planner obsession, really), but this one seems to fit how my brain works better than others have. (It’s the Clever Fox Premium Weekly, for the interested.)

I think part of my struggle with goals is that if I mess up once, my brain tells me I’ve failed, period, and I should just give up. I don’t often think of myself as a perfectionist these days, but I definitely have those all-or-nothing tendencies.

So this week I’ve been trying, and then working on being gentle with myself if I fall short. I’m trying to establish a new, earlier morning routine, which is hard, and I haven’t succeeded every day. But I’ve done better than I honestly thought I would, so that’s something.

The new year is hard. No matter how much I tell myself it’s an arbitrary marker of time, it’s hard to ignore the “time for a fresh start” energy everywhere. There’s a lot of pressure to improve.

One of my Facebook friends posted one of their resolutions as something like “eat the elephant (one bite at a time),” and that’s an attitude I’m trying to adopt. I’m shooting for some big shifts in 2020, and the only way to get them done is one bite at a time.