A couple years ago I decided to stop making New Year's Resolutions. Every year I would make these grand proclamations at the beginning of the year and by March or April, I would have already given up. The horrible feeling that accompanied this failure left me feeling defeated and like I would never accomplish these goals that I set year after year after year. So I stopped making them.

Instead, I've vowed to improve myself every day of my life. However, every new beginning requires a starting point. It might be the New Year, it might be the beginning of a new school year or semester, it might even be a birthday. But whenever you decide to declare a turning point, you yourself have to not only believe in what you've set out to accomplish but also do everything in your power to accomplish it.

At the beginning of last semester (my first semester of college), I decided that procrastination would not be in the cards for me. As someone who is obsessed with comfort and allergic to stress, it can be very easy for me to put off tasks that I'd have to go out of my way to accomplish.

For instance, in the past, I would much rather cram all of my work into one very stressful evening and enjoy every other day of the week than to do a little bit of work each day to ensure that everything gets done. I like routines; I like coming home from class and taking a nice warm shower, eating a really delicious lunch or dinner in front of Netflix, taking a nap, waking up to doing a tiny bit of work, and then falling asleep again at 10:30. That's an ideal night for me.

However, when I decided that I wouldn't torture myself with procrastination, I found that if I did my work as soon as it was assigned, if I stuck to a schedule no matter how much I wanted to relax, if I checked things off of my to-do list one by one, I would eventually find myself with all of my work done and nothing to do. I decided that procrastination was costing me a lot more than I was willing to pay-- so I quit.

I saw a change in myself and my friends even saw it too. They would tell me that my skin was clear and I looked stress-free and would ask me why I didn't look stressed during finals week (because I'd started studying a week and a half before everyone else).

Every semester students declare that this will be the semester that they make a 4.0. Straight As, no slacking, no Ls this semester. And at the end of every semester, those same students finish defeated, saying "we'll get 'em next year". This doesn't have to be you. If a 4.0 is what you want, make sure that that's what you get.

If you want to lose weight, do it. If you want to stop procrastinating, do that too. Of course, there will be bumps in the road. Of course, there'll be situations that are out of your hands. But you don't have to fail at your resolutions for lack of trying. Let lack of effort be the very last reason you don't succeed this year.