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As the dark days of winter creep to­ward the end of the year, many people con­sider res­ol­u­tions they want to make for 2025. I used to make res­ol­u­tions but some how they nev­er las­ted long. Two to four weeks was av­er­age. Two months was con­sidered a success.

Of course, that left me won­der­ing about my will power and feel­ing like a fail­ure. Gradually, without even real­iz­ing it, I shif­ted to a new way of mak­ing plans for a new year. I now make a list of goals.

Resolutions and goals are sim­il­ar but also quite dif­fer­ent. A res­ol­u­tion is some­thing you want to change.

A goal is some­thing you want to achieve. It in­cludes the steps you’ll take to ac­com­plish your goal and the date you plan to achieve it by.

It took me a while to fig­ure out what a goal is. I want to write a book and have it pub­lished is not a goal, it’s a dream. It’s like know­ing where you want to go but not how you’re go­ing to get there.

A goal goes some­thing like this: I want to com­plete an 80,000 word ma­nu­script by August 31, edit and re­vise it by December 31 and send it to a pub­lish­er or agent by January 1. To ac­com­plish this, I will work on my book for two hours every week­day and for four hours every Saturday.

Goals I know will be on my 2025 list are com­plet­ing a sol­id re­vi­sion of the nov­el I’m work­ing on and sev­er­al home im­prove­ment pro­jects to make my home more en­ergy ef­fi­cient and cool­er in the summer.

The home im­prove­ments – a ceil­ing fan, new blinds and new ap­pli­ances will be re­l­at­ively easy. Each one of those goals can be ac­com­plished with­in a month, leav­ing plenty of time for writing.

The writ­ing, how­ever, is al­to­geth­er dif­fer­ent. My cur­rent draft of the ma­nu­script con­tains 33 chapters. The thought of re­vis­ing that many chapters, es­pe­cially know­ing that half of them need ma­jor work, is daunt­ing. So, I’ll break the pro­ject down into man­age­able chunks.

Months that I’m work­ing on a fairly pol­ished series of chapters, I can re­vise four or more a month. While work­ing on chal­len­ging chapters, I may only be able to re­vise two a month so I’ll plan accordingly.

From past ex­per­i­ence I know it’s easy to be overly am­bi­tious and that mod­est, real­ist­ic time frames tend to be the most successful. 

But simply hav­ing a goal of­ten isn’t enough. To be truly ef­fect­ive ex­perts say you should write your goal down, make a com­mit­ment by telling someone your plan, and be­ing ac­count­able to that per­son. I con­sider my­self lucky to have two cre­at­ives – writer Caroline Woodward and artist Judi Wild — to share my goals with.

I try to be reas­on­able about what I can ac­com­plish yet push my­self a bit too. To be per­fectly hon­est, I nev­er meet all my self-im­posed dead­lines. But they keep me on track and mo­tiv­ate me to try harder.

Of course goals can be made any time of the year but I usu­ally map mine out dur­ing the last few days of December. I al­ways look for­ward to that in­ter­lude — the cusp of one year passing and an­oth­er be­gin­ning — and all the pos­sib­il­it­ies that brings.

Feature im­age at top: Night in the Forest, a paint­ing by Bev Byerley.