My New Year's resolution is to make my "free time" more flexible, and then to actually have the guts to go get a job.
For the first part, one of the first things for me to do is to stop reading so many darn news articles online.
Other stuff that I check online on a regular basis (fanfictions and forum posts) is stuff that I can realistically say to myself, "Don't worry about it too much, that can wait until tomorrow." Not so for news articles. There's always new things coming up, and many times it just can't wait until tomorrow, or the next new stuff won't make any sense.
From now on, whenever I check my email, I'm just going to: log on, check my email, log off, close the window, and that's it. (In my old routine, after logging off, I would quickly look through and open new tabs for anything I find interesting (most days, it's one or two dozen tabs, and sometimes even more), then one-by-one I would read the article and then close the tab, and only after every tab is closed do I finally close the window.) This part of my routine has taken up hours of my time each day, so not only will I be removing my only inflexibility, but I'll also be freeing up a lot more time. The only downside is that I'll no longer be caught-up with current events, but I honestly don't see that as such a bad thing anymore.
Originally, I had planned to start this change on New Year's Day, but since I had lost my internet connection for 24 hours just after Christmas Day, I figured, "Why wait one more week?" So, I guess you could say I decided to start my New Year's resolution a little early.
