New Year's Resolutions?

My husband doesn't believe in New Year's resolutions. He thinks that since most of the goals people set at the New Year are almost unachievable, we're better off not setting ourselves up for failure right at the beginning of the year. In a way, he's right. And I'm probably one of those people setting unrealistic goals.

There are two times of the year when I seem to take stock of my life and try to set goals for things I'd like to do: the start of the new year and the start of the schoolyear. Despite the fact that I've been out of school for more years than I'd like to admit, I still get a rush right before September, remembering that feeling of new beginnings and new possibilities. I often find myself purchasing new writing utensils and/or notebooks, despite the fact that just about everything I do now is on computers.

So here we are at the beginning of 2011, and I have a whole list of things I want to work on:
Learn Italian (this has been on my list every year for a LONG time)
Get back to jewelry making
Write/finally set up a blog
Downsize possessions
Work toward living more simply/locally
Keep pushing toward eating more locally
Knit more (not just at the Christmas rush!)
Craft more - set up Etsy shop for jewelry/crafts?
Give more to my job
Change my exercising (I'd love to add in blading)
Reconnect with friends
Get out and try new restaurants
Watch less TV

I look at this list, and it certainly seems like I could/should integrate all of this into my life. The trouble is, life seems to get in the way. I'll find half an hour of free time and decide that it's not enough to give to anything on this list, and instead, I fritter it away on something that's not really important to me.

I follow someone on Twitter who talked recently about setting a resolution for each month instead of having a list for the year. So I'm thinking that if I think about this list in terms of the whole year and tackling things in smaller steps, maybe I'll finally be successful at making all of them a permanent part of my life. It's worth a try, isn't it?