New Year's Resolutions For Poets, Writers, & Artist: How To Start & Keep a Habit:

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New Year's Resolutions For Poets, Writers, & Artist: How To Start & Keep a Habit:

As a Capricorn, I love to make lists. I also love to set goals or make resolutions or find ways to exist in the world better. I am nowhere perfect at it, but I see every day as a new beginning and I forget to do something 5 days in a row, I realize picking it back up on the 6th day is better than letting whatever habit or goal I was trying to achieve slip off into the universe to burn out behind some forgotten constellation called New Year's Resolutions.
For me, if I'm serious about a new habit (or resolution), I track it.
How I Start a Habit or Keep a Resolution. There are two ways I do this:
1) Literally mark it down in my journal (I'm starting a bullet journal this year, so more on that if it works out). But basically January 1: Monday ✓, January 2: Tuesday ✓, January 3: Wednesday ✓,....

While I am comfortable in a techy world, I love low-tech. Index cards, journals, post-it notes, let me live in a world of paper. You may want to keep your habit online, maybe through a habit-tracking/goal setting app. For me, a nice chart works perfectly, it's like I'm 5 years old and getting gold stars for picking up my toys. I have the personality where seeing a long row of checked boxes gives me more satisfaction than it should.

2) Have a group of people or one person I check in with on a certain day of a week.
Such as my Friday Submission Club. Every Friday I have to email a group of poets one place I submitted to during the week. While I wrote a viral post about submitting (Submit Like a Man: How Women Writers Can Be More Successfu l about the trends I noticed with women when I was the editor of a literary journal), I tend not to submit much.
Have a group I need to check in with and state where I've submitted, has helped. Plus I get inspiration from them as well as learn new places to submit.
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So what are my New Year's Resolutions this year?
2018

1) Read first thing in the morning (before checking email or going online)
2) Realize that when I post on Facebook, I am giving myself a small project-- decide if that is how I am going to use my time
3) Keep more lists
4) Focus on creative work first
5) Blog once a week
6) Write daily
7) Find new ways to be generous in the world
8) Share a poem a day (in person or online)
9) Take a daily walk (even if short)
10) Start a journal

****I think the key to all these resolutions is I control them.
I did not write, "Get published in 5 journals this year!" -- because I can't control that.
If I wanted to get published in 5 journals I'd first write, "Submit to 20 journals." Then I'd revise that (because seeing the number "20" feels overwhelming to me) to: "Submit to 1 journal every 2 weeks." Now that seems doable.

While it make look as if I have a lot of resolutions, they all can actually be done in a short amount of time. If I sit down and write for 10 minutes, that counts as writing. Even 5 minutes.

I am a big believer in small actions add up over time. So while you may not be writing every day, writing once a week for 20 minutes gives you 1040 minutes of writing over the year. Now divide that by 60 minutes, that's 17.33 hours of writing you would have done in a year. That's quite a bit of time. If you stretch yourself and write 30 minutes a week, you'll have 26 hours of dedicated writing in a year, that's over a full-day.
So don't discount the small stuff, whether in kind acts, in writing, in health, it all adds up.
And here's a short list of Resolutions I wrote for poets and writers, but it also works for artists of all genres. Just change that first line to:

1. Make time for your art and your artistic/creative life.
Whatever you are working on, may you continue to stay on track and know that if you get off track, you do not need to wait until January 1 to begin again, you get 365 days of fresh pages every single year. Just wake up and begin again.
Wishing you a creative 2018! xo