As the new semester approaches, you’re probably going to set yourself some goals. Jack Moran takes a look at which of those idealistic resolutions you’re fated to fail.

Every time a new semester comes around, we all like to think about the ways we’ll do better than the semester before. We set resolutions for ourselves, some feasible and some a little less so, and start the year off full of idealism and hope. By the end of the semester, however, we often find ourselves back where we started wondering just what made our resolutions go so wrong.

Resolution #1: Attend every lecture

You’ll start off with perfect attendance. For the first week or two you’ll be at every lecture, you’ll probably even be early. Around the third or fourth week, however, something will happen. Maybe you’ll sleep in one day or you’ll get rostered on to work. Maybe you’ll be sick. Maybe your car breaks down on the way to uni and you take that as a sign from the universe. In any case, by the fifth week you’ll be sitting at home and listening to the lecture on Echo360, already forgetting what your lecturer even looks like.

Resolution #2: Stop doing assignments the night before they’re due

You still remember the stress of racing to finish that last five hundred words before it hits midnight. You still feel the sting of disappointment when you read your work the next day and notice the page after page of spelling mistakes you’d missed in your haste the night before. You promise you’ll do better this year and, on your first assignment, you probably will. As your workload doubles then triples further along in the semester, however, you find old habits hard to break and you’re back to the mad dash to midnight once more.

Resolution #3: Cut back on the caffeine

There’s always plenty of debate about whether or not excess caffeine is bad for you. Whether your caffeinated poison of choice is a can of energy drink or a cup of coffee, the new semester might make you think about cutting back. You will definitely give it a shot and attempt to survive through the days of withdrawal but after a late night (probably from staying up to finish an assignment), you’ll crawl bleary-eyed to the kitchen and grab your familiar coffee mug on pure instinct. You won’t realise what you’ve done until the coffee has already worked its way through your system and you’ll have a hard time regretting your choice now that you can function like an actual human being again.

Resolution #4: Eat healthier

Last semester you read one too many healthy smoothie recipes while you were lying on the couch eating an entire tub of ice cream by yourself, so this semester you’ve decided to up your food game. Salads, wholegrains, raw foods and agave syrup. You’re not totally sure what most of these terms mean but you know that they’ll be good for you in the long run. You’ll make a valiant effort until the aroma of your favourite fast food restaurant tempts you when you walk past. Pretty soon quinoa becomes quin-what and you’re back to gorging yourself on chicken nuggets.

Resolution #5: Save your money

Looking across your room, you see the hoard of unnecessary junk you accumulated last year from the impulse purchases you fell prey too. You even still have that untouched spool of yarn from when you desperately convinced yourself you could learn to knit. This semester you decide to be a little more financially savvy and keep your hard-earned cash in the bank where it belongs. The next time you go to a shopping centre, you’ll tell yourself you’re just going window shopping. Which will be true, to an extent, when you come home carrying a new set of curtains that you will attempt to assure your family, friends or significant other that you just had to have. What were you saving all the money up for anyway?

Resolution #6: Exercise more

After running less than fifty metres to catch the bus and feeling like your lungs aren’t functioning, you decided that this semester you’re going to finally invest in your fitness. Whether your goal is to get shredded, swole, jacked, yoked, ripped or some other obnoxious fitness buzzword, you know it’s going to be #NewYearNewMe. That is until you see the price of a gym membership and sweat as much as if you had just done a full set of pull ups. Maybe being fit isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Robots are probably going to do all of our work in the future anyway.

Depending on your willpower and resources, there’s a fairly large chance you’ll break your grandiose new semester resolutions. Don’t feel too bad though, most people don’t fulfil their resolutions because we often set ourselves goals that are too broad. Instead we should think about more achievable and specific goals. You might not have gone to the gym every single day like you originally intended but maybe you’ve started jogging a couple of times a week. You might not be eating salads for every meal but maybe you’re making sure you eat three meals and you’re snacking less during the day. It’s all about making targeted, incremental changes over the course of the semester and celebrating the small successes.

Feature image: Flickr, Brett Jordan, no changes made.