Best New Year Resolutions Ideas

Christmas is upon us – and with it the end of another year of study. Here’s our pick of New Year resolutions ideas to keep you moving forwards in 2016.

1. Improve Your Fitness – of a Mental Kind

Could next year be the year you actually get smarter? Studying’s difficult. We know that. But you don’t have to take it lying down. There are loads of things you can do to tackle it head on and improve your brainpower – from walking a couple of miles a day and getting plenty of sleep (switch those mobile devices off, and reduce the light in your bedroom), to eating well and memory improvement exercises.

2. Set Goals – and then Stick to Them

In all fairness, this should probably have been No. 1. If you’re going to fail to achieve a goal, statistically speaking it will be your New Year resolution – unless of course you fall into the one in ten people who, studies suggest, manage to successfully keep them.

No matter. The fact is that setting, and sticking to, goals is pretty much the key to getting stuff done. Breaking days up into bite-sized chunks and having set goals for each of them is the difference between managing your time properly and achieving your academic objectives… and, well, not.

3. Work Your Budget Better

Spend less, save more is something of a clichéd New Year resolution. So how about spend less badly… spend more?

We could be really preachy about this: quit smoking, drink less, kick that dubious scratch card habit you’ve got into the long grass, and so on. But we’re not going to be. You know what makes you happy. You just need to make sure you spend your money accordingly. Draw up a list of ways in which your money ‘just disappears’ and then stop it doing so, rather than frittering it away on the things that don’t matter to you.

For more on this, see our edit of student money-saving tips.

4. Get Organised – Schedule Correctly

There’s a bit of a pattern emerging in our pick of New Year resolutions for 2016, isn’t there? And it’s this: sort the things out that surround your studies, and pretty much everything else will fall into place.

By getting organised, you get to spend more time with friends and family. You get to spend more time going out, shopping, listening to music, day-dreaming… you get to spend more time doing the things you love.

Get this wrong, and it’s you alone, up all night buried in last-minute revision or frantically trying to hit a tight coursework deadline. And nobody wants that.

(Pssst. We’ve got a few more time management tips over here.)

5. Learn Something New

Well, we would say this, wouldn’t we? Being a distance learning college, and all.

Except that’s not exactly what we mean. Learning’s not just about courses, books, exams and qualifications. It’s about playing musical instruments, mastering languages, figuring out how to code… anything, really. It’s about the fullness of life. And if we have any ambitions of goals for the next year, it should be that – living live to the fullest.

Happy Christmas – Wishing you all the best in 2016 from everyone here at Oxford Learning College!