I think one mistake I (and probably many other people) make with New Year's goals is try to go 100 MPH on the first day of the year, then get burnt out and/or so intimidated or overhwhelmed that I don't do some of the things.

So this year, I very deliberately plotted out my January with lots of little incremental tasks on my calendar.

Yesterday my task was not to do social media at work. Even though I left early and worked from home part of the day, I succeeded even at home. From when I got on the bus toward work until signing off at 5:30pm, I stayed off Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, SavingAdvice, and for good measure I'm throwing in Yahoo email, Google news and my budgeting spreadsheets, because those are all big time sucks. The only things I allowed myself to look at were Google calendar and Slack (which my household has started using to communicate and plan). And I let myself briefly go into one spreadsheet to help AS with a specific task.

Today, obviously, I'm letting myself back on at work. But that's the point of these incremental goals. In February I'll go up to two days per week for each of these tasks.

Today my task is not to have any alcohol.

I'm also trying to be gradual but persistent about adding back in healthy habits that fell off over the past couple months of 2017. Although not part of my 2018 goals, I want to restore them because they served me so well last year. So I've restarted my weekday morning strength exercises (4 days in a row this week) and skipping breakfast most days (3 days but then I did have a little breakfast today).

I still haven't gotten back into the walking 10K steps habit--I'm going to try for that once temps get back in the teens and 20s, which should hopefully start this weekend.

And I haven't gotten back into not snacking at night; there are still so many snacks in the house from the holidays. As they start to get eaten down, I'll try not to bring more snacks into the house, and gradually I hope to get rid of the night-snacking habit.

Baby steps!