Commitments You’ll Love to Keep: Reframe New Year’s Resolutions

Commitments You’ll Love to Keep: Reframe New Year’s Resolutions

(The following is the text of our New Year video/podcast message.)

Ed: Hi, Clutter Fairy fans! This is a special edition of The Clutter Fairy Weekly for December 30, 2025. I’m your co-host, Ed Gumnick, and I’m speaking with Gayle Goddard, certified professional organizer and owner of The Clutter Fairy in Houston, Texas, but coming to us today from Greensboro, North Carolina.

Gayle: Hi, everybody!

With New Year’s Eve just hours away, we may find ourselves thinking about resolutions, whether we usually make them or not. In our moments of self-reflection and inspiration, we often aim for very ambitious goals. We set resolutions…and then we get distracted and leave them by the curb. Why does that happen?

New Year’s resolutions fail more often than they succeed, and there are some predictable reasons for that:

• First, the goals of New Year’s resolutions are often too big, bold, lofty, and particularly vague. They’re too vague! For example, “I’m going to get fit” is a vague target without a clear endpoint. But “I’m going to exercise for 20 minutes twice a week” is much more specific and might be a realistic objective. And here’s another one: “I’m going to get ahead financially.” This desire is more of a wish than a resolution. But “I’m going to save $200 from every biweekly paycheck” is easier to measure. And it’s a goal that’s more possible to achieve each and every week as well.
• Ed: Resolutions sometimes fall short because a year is too long a period to sustain your energy and enthusiasm about any goal, no matter how worthy. That’s why we’ve recommended before that setting a new goal or objective for each new month as it comes along can be a more effective approach for a lot of people.
• Gayle: Another reason resolutions fail is when they focus too much on the negative. For example, “I will lose 50 pounds” is a less-effective source of inspiration and energy than “I will be more active, healthy, and comfortable in my body.”
• Ed: We stumble on some resolutions because we base them on what other people think we should want. But the best resolutions are ones that come from your heart and are focused on change that you sincerely want for yourself. It’s really hard to invest the effort needed in what others want for you.
• Gayle: Remember, your life is a marathon, not a sprint. New Year’s resolutions tease us with the prospect of overnight change, but within the timeframe of a full year, it’s hard for us to think realistically about how much time our new efforts and projects will actually require. With life’s many demands on us, big resolutions take tons of time to achieve.

Instead of making problematic resolutions for the next year, we’d like to suggest a few different ways to think about the changes you’d like to make in your life in the coming days, weeks, and months instead:

• Keep your attention on good outcomes, such as the objectives you’re working toward; the reason(s) you want to be organized; the things you want to have, or be, or do; the life you want to live. Make your resolutions about things that you love or would like to create in your life.
• Ed: Focus on cultivating small good habits that support the bigger goal. Like finding ways to tuck away $100 a week, or exercising three times a week, or making small but sustainable changes to your eating habits.
• Write down your goals and objectives in the form of promises to yourself, including the why of what you’re trying to achieve. For example, “To reach my goal of taking a vacation next summer, I will save $200 a week from each paycheck.”
• Gayle: Instead of depriving yourself of things, make your resolutions and commitments about filling your life with more good things: more time spent in nature, more caring for other people, more social outings, more reading, more live music. Here’s a good example for me: While I’m beading, I don’t eat snacks. If I craft more often, I can also eat less!

Finally, don’t forget to take a moment to celebrate everything you’ve accomplished this year. You may not have ticked the boxes for everything you set out to do last year, but don’t let that diminish what you did achieve. I’ll bet you did more than you think, and now is the time to look back and be proud of that. Take that sense of pride into 2026 and use it to bring energy to the new goals you set for yourself.

Ed: Thanks, Gayle. Before we go, I want to remind our viewers and listeners that we’ll be back for our next live webcast on Tuesday, January 6, 2026, at noon U.S. Central Time.

What did you learn about yourself and your stuff through your decluttering efforts in 2025? What lessons will you take forward into your organizing work in the new year? In our first live episode of 2026, Gayle will guide us through a decluttering and organizing review of 2025 and suggest ways for our audience to continue their growth, learning, and success in 2026.

Join us on January 6 for Looking Back to Move Forward: Your Organizing Year in Review. If you’d like to take the survey we’ve put out to help us prepare for that show, please visit cfhou.com/survey288.

Happy new year, Gayle!

Gayle: Happy new year Ed, and to all of you listening out there! We’re looking forward to another exciting and successful year together!