So today marks an end to 2015. 2015 has not been the best year for me, but the last four months of it were dramatically improved. I started my blog on the 23rd August and since then I have writen 97 blog posts, had 6,249 visitors who have viewed a staggering 13,909 times! I’m astonished! Especially as my blog is only four months old. I am so overwhelmed by those figures, I am completely amazed by them and I am thankful to everyone who has visited and supported my blog since it started. I especially would like to thank Steve at Philofaxy for including me regularly in the Philofaxy web finds. Most of my visitors come from there. Steve, you do an amazing job and really help out people like me. Thank you for taking the time and effort to help us Newbie Bloggers out! My last attempts at blogs have been no where near as successful and I had quickly abandoned them. Whilst I was not really concerned about views and was just interested in writing my previous attempt of just focusing on one idea meant that I ran out of inspiration and interest, eventually giving up. Thanks to subscribers and people who comment – it really keeps a blogger motivated to carry on writing posts and I really enjoy doing it! I am truly honoured to have people not only view my blog but also to leave comments about posts and I even have 24 followers – thank you for thinking I am interesting enough to follow. I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank you all for helping to support A random English life.
I have decided to do a bit of a round up of my posts and share with you some of the highlights.
This Year’s Movie Hit: Everest
This Year’s Movie Flop: American Ultra
My most viewed post: Filofax: Your Perfect Layout
So what is in store for the upcoming year for this blog? I’d like to add a couple new sections to my blog. I have a couple of posts I’ve been wanting to write for a while but sadly have not had time to them! So hopefully I’ll get those up too.
I have also joined the All Stars team, which is a team of Bloggers who will tour on each other’s blogs and write some posts. Although this is organised by Philofaxy, the blogs might not necessarily be planner related! So a big change is that I’ll have a guest blogger!
…and for me more generally? I have a couple of resolutions…seven to be precise that I would like to attempt this year. So far I have never completed a New Years Resolution for a full year, I never really get to the end of January, if I am honest. So I have decided to keep them a bit more simple in the hope that maybe I will achieve them. They are:
- Drink water every day
- Cut down on Coca-cola
- Eat fruit and veg every day
- Write a journal
- Be more positive
- Keep writing my blog
- Monitor and keep a healthy weight
Numbers 1 and 3 are really simple to do because all I have to do is focus on eating a minimum of one piece of fruit, one piece or veg and drink one glass of water a day. Obviously I am going to try and do more than the minimum but if I don’t it’s ok. Likewise number 6, keep writing my blog is also going to be pretty easy, at least for the moment because I have a ton of ideas for posts and I need to keep bashing them out. So far I have no run out of inspiration and even if I do – I may drop down from 5 posts a week to say 2 or 3. Number 4, writing a journal is a little more complicated, but I am again going to try and keep it simple and not put pressure to write 3 pages a day or something, some days I may only manage a quote or a sentence – that’s ok. I think the hardest ones on there are 2, 5 and 7. These are because they are the most vague. What exactly is a healthy weight? Well I’m not sure, at the moment I am a healthy weight but I don’t feel happy the weight I am – so I am going to experiment with eating a bit healthier and finding a good balance and then maintain that weight. Cutting down on Coca-cola is also deliberately vague. Caffeine is a drug and I am very much aware I am addicted to the caffeine and the sugar. I need to whine myself off it – and whilst I’d like to say I could only have x amount a day, I don’t know whether I could cope. I have introduced a 31 day challenge to not drink a drop of Coca-cola. This I imagine is going to be extremely tricky, but we’ll see how it goes.
Do any of you have similar New Years Resolutions? Maybe you have some different ones you would like to share? I am thinking that maybe building a little support community for those with similar goals might be a way of helping everyone achieve them. I need to start investigating that possibility.
A Happy New Year to everyone and may 2016 be fantastic for you!
All the best,
Emma