2010 was a year of, well, wishing really really hard that success fairy would come and clonk me over the head with a better job, a more organized life, and a cleaner house.

You can guess how well that worked out.

But 2010 wasn’t a horrible year, just a very rudderless one. After 2009 and the end of college, I found myself lacking the weekly goals (and successes!) that classwork imposed on my life. For three years I’d been relying on an outside source to provide tasks and rewards, so in retrospect, I can’t be too surprised that I fumbled the ball a bit when that ended.

(I did start out with the idea of making up monthly and weekly goals as I went, but fell into the procrastination that is ‘I’ll do it later.’ Planning to have a plan is not as useful an exercise as might be hoped.)

Thus my big successes for 2010 consisted of giving up Diet Coke for five months, losing enough weight that I had to buy new clothes, and finally winning NaNoWriMo without sneaking in college term papers.

Milestones were surviving a year of working at my current job, still being sane a year post-graduation, and the celebrating an eight year wedding anniversary.

There are plenty of things that I meant to do, and was going to do, and should have done– but instead of dwelling on them, I’m going to use those failures to improve my goal-setting process for next year. As hysterical as my lunch fortune cookie was, it does have a point.

Goodbye 2010, Hello 2011!