Nonfiction Book Reviews

On January 1st, I wrote a blog about my New Year’s goal for January: Post every single day on this blog in the month of January.

Well, I have to say that I’m pretty darn happy with myself - I made it!  Here’s, let all sit and enjoy the picture that “says it all,” shall we?

Isn’t that pretty? A part of me wants to print that picture off and frame it on the wall. Hey, it might make for an interesting dinner topic, right?

This experiment taught me a lot about setting goals. Every other New Year’s, I’ve sat down with a piece of paper and pencil, and wrote out a huge list of things I wanted to do better. Nothing was safe. I was going to study harder, lose weight, keep a cleaner house, waste less time on the internet, write in my journal every day, post every day on my blog, finish a novel and submit it for publication (ha!)…the list was horrendously long. I hardly ever made it past day one. Most people don’t make it to February - heck, I didn’t make it midnight on January 1st.

I decided that this year, I was going to do things differently. Instead of trying to become perfect overnight (I know, I know, I’m already pretty darn close to perfection, but still!) I would instead focus on one goal for the entire month. It wouldn’t matter if I didn’t get anything else done for the entire month of January - if I put up one post every day on this blog, I would consider January a success.

What made this work was the fact that I didn’t set the goal that I would post every single day on this blog for the whole year. If I had, by the end of week one, I would have been “tired” one night, and would have skipped, thinking to myself, “Well, I know there’s no way I’m actually going to post every single day for an entire year. C’mon, that’s just not going to happen. I might as well quit trying right now.” And there goes that New Year’s goal.

But every day for a month? Well, I could do a month. It wouldn’t kill me. So even on the days that I didn’t feel like posting (hopefully that didn’t shine through on my posts, but my apologies if it did!) I pushed myself and made it happen.

So what am I going to do with this new-found knowledge? Set a new goal for February.  Just one attainable goal.

As any reader of this blog already knows, I’m not the world’s best housekeeper. My house isn’t horrendous, but yeah, I could definitely use some help in that arena. Hence my goal for February: Keeping certain areas of my house clean. I have made out a list of “hot spots” (areas that tend to get dirty quickly) and I will make sure that I have those places clean before going to bed. Every night. Without fail.

If I can do that, then February will be a success in my book.

So what about posting on here? Well, I won’t be here every day, but I’m going to try my best to be here several times a week. If you want to make sure that you don’t miss any of my earth-shattering posts, be sure to either sign up for my RSS feed, subscribe to my Twitter feed, or sign up to receive an email each time I post (click on the “Get Nonfiction Lover delivered by Email” link).

Don’t miss me too much.

Hava