Why Starting a Blog is a Good New Year's Resolution

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Now, just to be clear, I don't really consider this blog to be a New Year's Resolution. I don't like New Year's Resolutions, because I feel like if I don't stick to them for even one day, I lose. And if you've been following the blog, you'll notice that that's already happened - I didn't write anything on Friday or Monday. I plan on publishing multiple entries today to make up for it, but technically nothing came out of here on those days. If I had made a New Year's Resolution to start a blog and update it every day, I'd feel like I broke the resolution and I'd probably give up.

I guess I just decided that starting a blog was something I wanted to do, and New Year's is a time when people generally start new things. I dunno, maybe I'm splitting hairs - for some reason I have this idea in my head that a New Year's Resolution is something that you try to do every day, like practicing the trumpet or exercising. That's clearly not the case, as lots of people make non-daily resolutions like losing 20 pounds or even more vague things like improving at a skill. I guess I'm just trying to convince myself that the blog isn't a NYR because I don't like NYRs for some unknown reason.

Anyway, if you've gotten this far after all that boring pre-amble about how this blog ISN'T a NYR, here is why I think starting a blog IS a good NYR: it encourages and facilitates your other NYRs. To be specific, if you set a goal of writing a blog post every day, then you can kill two birds with one stone by writing posts related to your other goals. If I resolve to read a book every week, then one of the features of my blog could be a weekly book review. If I resolve to learn how to sculpt, I could chronicle this process through my blog. If I resolve to try whitewater kayaking, I could live-blog the event.

Of course, this idea isn't specific to New Year's Resolutions. Blogging is just generally an effective way to learn new things or improve at things you already enjoy doing. My Sunday post was a movie review, and writing the review forced me to be more analytical, something that I don't often do with movies. The other day I received my glasses prescription in the mail, which I had never really understood. I'm thinking about writing a post explaining how the weird numbers on your prescriptions relate to your actual vision; if I wasn't writing the post I'd probably only look up my own prescription.