by Virginia Allain

Created on: January 07, 2010

Committing to resolutions or goals becomes easier if you have feedback from others. Take advantage of the website 43 Things to keep your resolutions on track this year. The site helps you by committing the goals to print and provides encouragement and suggestions from others with the same goal.

To get started, just sign up with the usual username and password. The site is free.

Start choosing your 43 Things (goals). Before entering a goal, put the keyword in the search field to see how many people have this goal. Perhaps you want to lose weight. The search brings up many variations of this goal. If you put "lose weight" then you share your goal with 29,000 people and the discussion on that goal will be very active. If you put "lose weight once and for all," you will be in a group with 22 people. Click on a goal and scan down to see some of the entries and decide if that's the one for you. If yes, then click on the button I WANT TO DO THIS. That becomes one of your 43 things.

You can browse around to see what things other people want to do and get ideas. It might ins pire you to learn to work on cars or quit drinking sodas or get over a fear of spiders. After choosing some goals, you can return and add more at any time. After choosing your goals, look at them and enter some comments about them. Others with the same goal may have suggestions for you or say encouraging things. There's a place to ask for advice in meeting the goal.

You can add your own comment on other people's comments and questions and give them a cheer. It also gives the option to send yourself reminders on your goal (daily, weekly, or monthly) by e-mail. Take advantage of all these features. You can rearrange the order of your list also to put your most important goals and resolutions at the top.

The site recommends that you choose a mix of ambitious and some silly goals and make a good number of goals (between 20 and 43) is suggested. That way you'll have some easy resolutions that give you a boost when you accomplish them. The best method is to review the list of 43 things (or however many you chose) each week. Talk with friends about the goals so you feel accountable to someone else besides to the online community on 43 Things.

You can challenge yourself by adding a completion date to one of your goals and declaring your stakes. You can only challenge yourself with one goal at a time, so choose your challenges wisely!

Regularly return to the 43 Things website and update your goals. When you get stuck on a goal that no longer suits you. Just remove it from your list. By revising and adjusting goals throughout the year, it's easier to stay on track. One can make mini-resolutions instead of the do-or-die New Year's resolutions that are notoriously hard to maintain.

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