Keeping resolutions throughout the new year

bNew Year’s resolutions are a lot like the lotto: you have to play if you want to win.

We all know people who make them, both the serious ones and the funny. It’s either about losing weight, becoming more organized, better money management or the attempt to not hear the campy song “Christmas in the Northwest” for the fifth year in a row. Yes, the latter is one of mine for this year.

Proactive Change noted that about 40 to 45 percent of Americans make resolutions for the new year. And how many people keep them? Well, around 75 percent manage to survive the first week, 71 percent can handle it for two weeks. From there, 64 percent keep their resolutions after one month, and 46 percent continue it after half a year.

I was never good at math, but that sounds pretty good. Perhaps there is something to this whole idea of resolving to do something over the course of a year.

The survey also says that people who make precise resolutions are 10 times as likely to succeed as those who don’t. Go figure.

It’s fairly easy to see how some resolutions fail down the road. Some have too high of expectations, others require vast amounts of time and some just lose interest. It’s an awfully similar situation that plagued my fantasy baseball team management last year. By the fourth week, I’d lost interest.

Aside from my aforementioned annual song avoidance resolution, I have a few others on my list. Among them include: take at least one strong photo each week, travel more often and see at least one Mariners game.

Last year included several great moments, and 2013 can only expand on those, I hope. I saw Felix Hernandez throw a near-perfect game in Seattle, met great Spokane community leaders and honed a few talents. Among the highlights included having a concert photo shared with hundreds of thousands of people on Twitter.

What are resolutions you hope to keep throughout the year? Let us know in a comment online, or on the Free Press Facebook page.

My resolutions may sound somewhat easy, but at the same time, the year tends to fly by at an incredible rate. Before you know it, the end of the year is at hand and you haven’t set foot outside of Spokane. The end of another year is just simply a big deadline, and being in the news media, we know all about deadlines.

As the late, great Douglas Adams once said, “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”