Just a Coke please

Another year, another attempt to reinvigorate my blogging.

Even by my standards I’ve managed to produce an impressively long list of resolutions for this year. I know this is against the best advice of those who study the factors that allow us to keep our resolutions. But this time around I’ve decided to try to give myself the best chance of succeeding by just making so many resolutions that I’m bound to live up to one of them, if only by accident. There’s also the significant factor that I’ve had quite a bit of time off this last week, and so I’ve had all the time in the world to think of things it would be nice to try to do in 2012.

Besides, a half hour into the year it’s going quite well so far, so I may as well be optimistic about the rest of it.

A resolution that I expect to be among the most interesting to try to keep is one that I actually started on during 2011. It is to create a shorter-term resolution for each of the 12 months of the year. This is a slight variation on Matt Cutts’s 30-day challenges. I’ve changed it from 30-day periods to using calendar months mostly so that I can do something a little more daunting in February and only have to keep it up for 29 days (the leap year has unfortunately halved the effectiveness of this scheme).

But that’s a month away. I’d be getting ahead of myself if I revealed already what I hope to do then.

January, on the other hand, is literally on top of us. This month’s challenge is an echo of one I completed in June last year. Back then I went 30 days without caffeine. This time around it’s going to be alcohol. I expect to face a bit of skepticism when telling people about this endeavor. Most of my friends will be familiar with my claims of “giving up alcohol”, a phenomenon that seems to correlate strongly with late nights out and mysterious morning illnesses. So it’s worth pointing out two important facts: correlation does not imply causation; and I made the decision to cut out alcohol this month in state of complete sobriety and un-hungover-ness.

I put my celebratory wine glass down as the clock ticked towards 00:00, and I won’t be picking it back up until February.