Another year passes, and another blog begins.

To start off 2015, and finally get this blog going, here are my new years resolutions. I haven’t really done these in the past, so this is a bit new. However, I think it is important to have a number of goals and expectations for myself in the new year.

So here it goes.

1. Be present. This means two things. First, no more multitasking. If I am working on something, my whole attention should be on that one thing, and it should be there long enough to get useful work done. Second, and more importantly, it applies to when I’m talking with other people. It means that I will make every effort to give a person my full attention when we are talking, without looking at my phone, computer screen, or whatever else I might want to get distracted by.

2. Exercise 6 days / week. Pretty simple, I just have to either make it to the gym or go on a 30 minute run 6 days a week. No excuses.

3. Minimize internet distractions. No more Reddit (I already added 0.0.0.0 reddit.com to my hosts file), and less Facebook and Twitter. I still need to figure out how to measure this.

4. Meditate daily. I started this in December, and I plan to continue through 2015. I will write a whole post about meditation within the next couple days.

5. Smile more. There have been studies that show that smiling more can make a person happier (no, I’m not going to look them up for you). I think this will help keep me sane through the next semester. It will also make me more likable.

6. Plan out assignments the day they are assigned, and DON’T DO THEM THE NIGHT BEFORE THEY’RE DUE. This is something I struggled with through the last semester. I will make a better effort to fix this. More to come soon, probably.

In general, I need to just plan my time better. This means, at least to start (but after break is over), I will try to plan out my days the night before, which should give me less of an excuse to waste time.