How to make New Year’s Resolutions fun. No, really.

I’m rubbish at resolutions. I’m rubbish at sticking to things, even things I know are good for me and will make me happy. But I do like games and challenges and collecting points/being virtually patted on the head* and so I managed to find a few ways to make resolutions fun. If you’re a dork like me.

I read about 750 Words online somewhere (sorry, can’t remember where) and signed up straight away. If I did do resolutions, one would be to write more and faff less, so 750 Words is perfect. Plus you collect points and get badges (for, for example, writing for 3 days in a row, writing a certain number of words, etc.). I plan to reward myself for each badge. (I got the 3 day badge yesterday and bought a Sadler’s Wells book for an upcoming Twitter book club.) And, being a dork, I really love the stats:

Following some links on 750 Words took me to Health Month, which I find slightly confusing (I’m not at all sure I’m doing it right), but basically you commit to a few health improvements for a month – they can be as big or as small as you like – and, again, you collect points. Mine are to drink three glasses of water, eat one piece of fruit, exercise for minimum 10 minutes each day, and limit myself to one alcoholic drink per week (I was thinking of going ‘dry’ for January, but there’s Bailey’s left in the bottle). So far, so have-made-the-same-”resolutions”-every-year-for-as-long-as-I-can-remember. But the best part of Health Month for me is that you can sign up to a reminder email for each of the improvements you choose (you do have to pay for this, but it was something like £3). So this morning when I got my ‘eat fruit’ email, I immediately went and, you know, ate a piece of fruit. No, not that big a deal for most people, but I can honestly go weeks without eating fruit usually. I leave the emails unread in my inbox until I’ve done them and since I check my inbox about a kajillion times a day, I’m reminded over and over. (A few months down the line I may well become jaded and just delete them without doing, but for now they are actually inspiring me.)

As mentioned in my Books of the Year post, I struggle to tear myself away from the iPad and read and I want to stop doing that, not so much because I want to read more – although I do always want to read more – but because I want to waste less time faffing about on social media. So I challenged myself to read 100 books in the Goodreads 2013 Reading Challenge.

Eek. Better get back to my book.

*Please note: I do not like being patted on the head IRL.