Horse Illustrated Magazine

Last year, my New Year’s resolutions were to perfect a bagel recipe and learn how to make latte foam art. I don’t know where that came from. I must have been in an upscale café somewhere when someone asked me what my resolution was. Also, I don’t want to say I’m the only person in America whose 2014 resolutions would lead to increased consumption of refined carbs and caffeine, but I’d guess it puts me in a pretty exclusive club. In any case, I never followed through with either one.

I didn’t really make resolutions this year, either, and maybe it’s because of my lack of follow-through in previous years. Most of the time, I suspect I’ve forgotten what my resolutions were by mid-March, and even if I don’t forget, a year is a long time and priorities change. I probably forgot all about my cozy café-inspired goals once spring weather arrived and latte weather faded away. The same could be said for more traditional resolutions. Going to the gym five days a week seems like a worthy goal in December, but by April, it seems stupid to hole up in a sweaty-people-filled building when you could be spending the increasing daylight at the barn.

So forget resolutions. But I still think working toward goals is important, so instead I’m going to attempt 30-day challenges. This is an idea that gained popularity thanks to a very short TED talk by Matt Cutts. As the head of webspam at Google, Cutts is well-known to those of us who maintain websites for a living. But his TED talk has nothing to do with his day job—he’s just a guy who found a way to try new things. Take a look.

I’ve followed this model every now and then. Once I gave up Facebook for 30 days (it wasn’t hard, though I did revert back to daily mindless browsing once the month was up.) I’ve also done the photo-a-day challenge successfully. So to kick off 2014, I am embarking on a 30-day blogging challenge. For every day of January, I will post a new, horse-related blog here in The Near Side.

What do I hope to accomplish with this? I don’t know, but I enjoy blogging and it often ends up getting pushed to the bottom of my to-do list. This will force me to make time for it. Will the blog posts be high-quality? Probably not. In fact, given the doldrums of my equestrian life these days, I’m already worrying about running out of material, but we’ll see what happens.

So, what should I blog about? And what are your New Year’s resolutions? And if you don’t do resolutions, how do you feel about 30-day challenges? Tell me about it in the comments.

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Leslie Potter is Sr. Associate Web Editor for horseillustrated.com. Follow her on Twitter: @LeslieInLex.