Who doesn’t love the clean slate of a new year? It’s an opportunity to reflect on how your year has gone and the chance to start fresh. Whether you want to lose weight or write a book, cook more or invent time travel, your Rocketbook notebook is the tool you need to stay on track with your New Year’s resolutions! (Though admittedly, that last one might be tough.)

Step 1: Brainstorm

Before making a year-long commitment to what your resolutions will be, start with a brainstorming session. Write down what went well (and not so well) in the previous year. Don’t think too hard about this, it can include that you earned your degree or that you simply drank too much coffee. The key here is that you’re honest with yourself about the last 365 days.

Read over your newly brainstormed list and convert the ideas into New Year’s resolutions. Don’t limit yourself at this point — try to use every idea on your list. Following the example from earlier, this list might include “get a job related to my degree” or “limit myself to one cup of coffee a day”. Your Rocketbook notebook is perfect for this! Start with a clean notebook and fill as many pages as you need.

After your brainstorm, read over your new list of resolutions. Circle any items that jump out at you as something to focus on in the new year. Feel free to have resolutions for different categories of your life, like health, career, and relationships. You can even pick one major resolution to focus on like building a house or inventing a time machine (though again, the latter is a doozy).

Need to erase your brainstorm so you can take other notes? Not a problem, just use the Rocketbook app to scan and send your brainstorm notes to your favorite cloud service and refer back to them at any time.

• List the good and bad of this past year
• Convert your list into resolutions
• Pick the resolutions you want to focus on

Step 2: Write Your Resolutions Somewhere Obvious

Once you’ve chosen your resolutions for the upcoming year, the next step is to keep them. The unfortunate fact is that 80% of new year’s resolutions are abandoned by February. That’s why it’s so important to write down your resolutions — Neuroscience has shown that writing your goals down helps you achieve them!

You’ve already written down your resolutions in Step 1, but to make sure you see them every day, rewrite them on the first page of your Rocketbook notebook. You’ll flip past them every time you go to take notes which will be a constant reminder that you need to hit the gym, apply for jobs, or buy a part for your time machine (we still don’t support that last idea, by the way).

• Pick a spot where you’ll see the resolutions often
• Rewrite your resolutions

Step 3: Make an Action Plan

Long term resolutions can be intimidating and are easy to put off. To stave off these common missteps, make a short term, step-by-step plan.

Breaking your resolution down into bite-sized steps has two powerful benefits. First, you’ll be able to visualize the path to successfully fulfilling your resolution. Second, a step-by-step approach has the added benefit of giving you quick wins. You’re more likely to feel great about your progress if you can check off “run 4 times” each week, rather than feeling overwhelmed by the goal to “run a marathon”. Steps are easier to follow — it’s why we’ve broken down this guide into 4 steps instead of making it one giant paragraph.

If you’re not a naturally gifted planner, use a Rocketbook notebook to help you! You can use time blocking to organize your action steps into a weekly schedule or you can follow a daily planning schedule with our reusable planner. If you find yourself falling behind on your resolution, just use your time machine to start the year over. Just kidding — take a deep breath, take the pressure off yourself, and recognize that struggling to keep a resolution is okay and means you’re working hard.

• Break down your resolution
• Organize your plan
• Know it’s okay to struggle

Step 4: Track Progress

When progress is slow and steady, it’s easy to forget where you started and how much you’ve improved since the beginning.

Give yourself a well-deserved pat on the back by tracking your progress. record how many push-ups you do each week or how much time you spent practicing guitar. Whatever your resolution, it will be fun to look back at weeks and months of progress to see how far you’ve come!

With your Rocketbook notebook at your side, it’s easy to pick a method for tracking your New Year’s resolutions! Use any of the Rocketbook Panda Planner's planning templates or create your own. No matter how you decide to monitor yourself, commit to scanning your progress page each week as a reminder an extra reminder to work on your resolution. This step might be made easier if you know what type of goal setter you are.

• Pick a method to track your progress
• Commend yourself on your growth
• Check-in regularly

Everyone sets new year’s resolutions, but most people don’t keep them. Simply by reading this guide, you’ve set yourself up for success, for you now know the common points of failure and how to avoid them. Additionally, paired with your Rocketbook notebook or planner, you’re an unstoppable force that can easily brainstorm, write, plan, and track your resolutions.