A Product Designer’s Approach to New Year’s Resolutions

For the past few years, I’ve gotten into the habit of replacing New Year’s resolutions with more tangible goals because I always felt resolutions were too vague and that’s why we never keep them. Goals, broken down by categories such as ‘bad habits to break’, ‘new things to learn’, and ‘places to travel’ are easier to track and easier to accomplish because they’re specific and tangible. One of the goals I set for 2019 was to write at least one blog post per month. Halfway through the year and I’m still on track to achieving that goal, but as June comes to a close today, I have yet to post one this month.

I love to write think pieces and I love the Medium community, but inspiration doesn’t always come on such a frequent and regular basis. Sometimes I have multiple ideas that I want to write about in the span of a few weeks and sometimes I go months distracted by my job, a plethora of reality tv, or whatever else is going on in life and can’t put any words together worthy of anyone reading. But by forcing myself to write something, anything, even when I feel like I’m up against a writer’s block or could be doing other things with my time, has allowed me to feel less of a need for perfection. So what if one of my blog posts isn’t my greatest piece of writing? There’s always next month.