What will you do this year?

It seems to be the New Year's resolution, except it doesn't seem to matter when you start it. The first time of heard of such a thing was with the movie Julie and Julia-which I love.


But I've been hearing these type of pledges much more now-maybe a spin off of ideas from the movie.
For example, people pledging not to buy new clothes for a year-which is great, simplistic, environmental and budget friendly to go secondhand for sure. Taking it one step further is this blog New Dress a Day. She is buying used dresses from garage sales, flea markets, vintage stores and such, giving herself a budget of $365 and as much for materials for a year (btw where is she shopping? Even Goodwill still sells things for $5-10). She is getting  a "hideous" dress each day and turning it into something amazing! She is taking her commitment and wearing it! Good quality work here.

Then today I read on NYTimes about a composer who is writing a new piece of music every day for a year. From the article, it sounds like he is able to do this in a couple hours each day. I haven't listened to the music but is anyone else skeptical? Maybe it's not that crazy, people do improve music, although I will admit listening to the same person for awhile it sounds pretty repetitive to me.

Summary of all this-setting personal goals good, giving yourself time limits to achieve those goals, also important. But, completing a project every day for a year? Overkill? What about underkill? I think for some of these projects, it works really well. But did Julie in the movie Julie & Julia do a great job cooking the some 500 recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking? My guess is no. Probably in slamming through the recipes, there was very little perfecting of the recipes going on. Something that I would argue, is pretty important to being a good cook. It took me baking oatmeal cookies about 10 times for them not to be too dry or too sweet, but the first time I made a lemon meringue pie it was a success. Sometimes it's weird what comes naturally and what doesn't. Anyway, my take home message here is I think this world would benefit by more people setting goals to improve something, not just finish something.

My goal for the moment? Starting an organic vegetable garden, and hopefully saving on groceries in the process (organics are expensive!). The garden will even take a little work each day. But the vegetables, they will take months to be "finished." And I like it that way.