Our 2026 New Year’s Resolution

OUR LIFE

Our 2026 Resolution

We’re determined to stick with our resolution this year, but we need your help to succeed.

Setting and maintaining resolutions can be overwhelming, so we figured we’d keep it simple and put a plan together.

We wanted to set our sights on something meaningful that would benefit us and those around us. Ideally, our resolution wouldn’t require us to spend money, nor would it require a major change in our routines (because we’re already amidst quite an overhaul). Most importantly, we wanted to focus on something we could do together.

These conversations just happen to coincide with holiday planning and we found ourselves saying, “I wish I kept in better touch with…,” “I wonder what so-and-so is up to,” or “I should reach out to X while they’re home for the holidays.” And we wondered why those efforts needed to be concentrated to the end of the year.

That’s how we find ourselves here.

Our Resolution

Keep in touch with our loved ones!

Our Plan

• Share your resolution.

  Accountability is key. We like to think we’re self-motivated, but it never hurts to share the responsibility, right? We shared our plan with our holiday cards and now, on our blog. We’re hoping our friends and family help us with our resolution by reciprocating our efforts, so we’re keeping in touch with each other.

• Get organized.

  We’re leaning full-tilt into communication this year — phone calls, video chats, texts, snail mail, newsletter, email, social media, and in-person visits. That gives us many options (thankfully!) but it also means we have some information to gather. Once we do, we need to figure out some logistics, like when and where and how to reach out to people.

  • Confirm contact information. Have a general sense of how / when to best contact people.

  • Set a reasonable cadence. Consider what makes most sense for our schedule to make the effort manageable and not overwhelming.

• Set interim goals.

  Unsurprisingly, we’re data-and-objectives people. Immediately, we wondered: How does one measure the objective success of keeping in touch with our loved ones? While we can measure our progress against the number of people we reach out to, the frequency of those conversations, the minutes conversed or messages exchanged, those metrics won’t be able to tell us how deeply our relationships have evolved or how meaningful our interactions are. So, we’re not tracking hard numbers, but we’re hoping to be more intentional with how we approach our outreach and conversations.

  • Lean into milestones. Center our efforts around meaningful moments, like birthdays, graduations, weddings, etc.

  • Pick up and respond. Make a concerted effort to acknowledge and respond to messages. We leave so many messages unread or we forget to follow-up. We want to do better.

• Just do it. It doesn’t need to be perfect. It doesn’t need to happen every day. The effort just needs to be a priority and practice needs to be consistent.

So this is us putting our plan to action, and a call to our loved ones to hold us accountable.

Until our next chapter!

xo, James & Victoria

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