It’s 2020: a new year, a new decade, and for many people a new opportunity to measure their expectations. It’s a time of reflection and a time of trying to come up with goals that you hope to obtain in a year’s time, even if resolutions don’t always work out for the best. But still, we keep trying, because for this one window of time we feel like there’s hope that things will be better the next time that ball drops. Maybe we aren’t coming out of one of our “worst” years, maybe we’re even coming out of one of our best – but even then we still want to try to make sure this next one’s better. And, for at least the first couple of months, most of us think we can.

Resolutions are a bit of a funny thing. We always want to make big, sweeping changes in our lives, but study after study shows we’re less likely to make those changes than we are to make smaller, more reasonable changes over time. We make general, feel good declarations, yet those same studies say that specifics are more likely to succeed. So, ideally, we want to make specific goals with defined milestones that can be achieved in steps.

Of course this means that my resolution for the year is to make sure every day counts and that I take advantage of more opportunities – because I’m terrible at taking advice.