Since you are already familiar with New Year’s resolutions, it should not surprise you to realize that the beginning of the new calendar year is a good time to set study skills goals. Even though the new calendar year falls in the middle of the school year, and could fall at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of a grading period, depending on how your school’s calendar is arranged, it is still good time to take an extra look at how you are progressing with your study skills and see what else you can do to improve them.
If you’ve been trying to make improvements all along, what you choose as a New Year’s goal does not need to be anything big. You may have heard, in fact, that the bigger the New Year’s resolution, the harder it is to follow through with it, and that by the end of January, most people who have planned to make big changes in their lives have given up on their New Year’s resolutions. While this may make you think you shouldn’t set New Year’s goals at all, nothing could be further from the truth. Just as with study skills improvements throughout the school year, the ones you choose as goals for the new calendar year should be specific and manageable, and should build on what you are already doing. You can choose to make small improvements across several subjects, or focus on making bigger improvements to a single subject, but you don’t need to do both. You can focus on improving your grades, but instead of suddenly declaring that you will get all “A”s, choose a subject or two where you recognize that your effort might be lacking and set a goal to raise those grades by putting more effort into tests, assignments, or whatever else might be causing those grades to slip. The most important thing to remember is that the more specific you are about how you plan to improve your grades and/or your study skills, the better you will do.
Another important thing to remember about study skills in general and New Year’s goals in particular is that you should be realistic about where you are and where you want to be. No matter how much or how little work you’ve done to improve your study skills this school year, set goals that build from wherever you are, and recognize that getting to where you want to go will take time. If you have not done much to improve your study skills yet this school year, it is okay to think of the new calendar year as if you are starting over, and to set the type of goals you should have set at the beginning of the school year. If you have made some improvements but find that you still struggle with certain things or in certain subjects, it is okay to recommit to some of your previously-set goals instead of setting new ones, as long as they are specific and manageable enough. If they’re not, you can always tweak them to make them more realistic or to add actions you will take to help you meet them. If you are pleased with the progress you are making, try to find new ways to improve and make those your goals. Even if you think you are already where you want to be, there will always be more you can do, and simply recommitting yourself to continuing to do what you have been doing is a worthy goal in that case.
Perhaps the most important thing to remember about New Year’s resolutions and study skills goals is to make them your own and focus on what you think you can do. I have stated before that your study skills journey is unique to you. This means that your study skills goals, including your New Year’s resolutions, should be unique to you as well, and should not be influenced by what others choose to do. If you have the chance to share ideas, go for it, but make your own choice in the end, because the more you feel a choice of resolution or goal is your own, the more likely you are to stick with it.
Turning study skills goals into New Year’s resolutions is not meant to take the place of evaluating where you are in your school year. Instead, it is meant to supplement what you do to keep track of your progress throughout the year. In my next post, I will continue to focus on goal setting by providing you another opportunity to look at your grading periods, to see what improvements you’ve made from one grading period to the next, what you will do to continue to improve as a new grading period begins or approaches, and how the New Year’s resolutions you make will fit in to your plans for your new grading period, as well as for your school year as a whole. One of the best ways to improve your study skills, as well as your academic success, is to recognize that both short-term and long-term goals matter, and the better you become at regularly evaluating and updating your short-term goals, the more able you will be to focus on your long-term goals as well.