New Day Resolutions

New Year’s Day is here. It’s considered a time of new beginnings, of fresh starts. People have made, or will be making, resolutions again.

I’ve read that New Year’s resolutions have a low efficacy. Few people follow through on them. In my own experience, I tend to become distracted, or I forget my resolve, or I change my mind, and I just get frustrated.

But the funny thing people seem to forget about resolutions is that you can make them at any time.

Recently, I re-read a poem wrote in college titled “Catechism.” It is about a teacher delivering a message of self-absolution to a solitary student. It reminded me of the book Tuesdays with Morrie, which I read just about a year ago. For those who haven’t read it, Morrie chronicles the decline of a sociology professor to ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, and his final lesson to the author, a student he came to love like a son. In the book, and in my poem, the teacher implores the student to set the past behind and indicates that it is never too late to make a change.

Building on this idea, I realized that there may be a simple way to overcome the problem of the New Year’s resolution. Why wait until the new year? It would be better to make resolutions every day. Daily resolutions would provide several things:

• Focus your mind daily on your resolutions
• Offer flexibility to change your resolutions regularly
• Provide more frequent opportunities to re-establish resolutions when you fail them

Some productivity experts adhere to this sort of daily ritual. However, production is not the goal: Happiness is. New-Day Resolutions are not task lists; they are proclamations about the things you want to get out of your day. Thinking daily about your happiness seems like a pretty darn good idea.

Ideally, resolutions should be made in the morning. It’s harder to resolve to do something that day when the day is almost over. But of course, as long as a day still is happening, it’s not too late to make a resolution — even If it’s 11:59.

So, this year, I only have one New Year’s Resolution: To resolve, every day, to make a resolution.