Resolutions may seem a bit passé in 2025 — especially in the sharp morning light of the new year.

The Pew Research Center reports that less than one-third of people still set a New Year’s resolution. Yet nearly a quarter of resolvers don’t even make it a week before falling off the wagon.

And sure, all the traditional resolutions are good for you: Exercising more, cutting down on alcohol, saving more of your paycheck, spending more time with loved ones and doing things you love. Resolve to do all the above!

But those things are hard. They take discipline, concentration, determination. And they have no space for Twinkies or pints of beer. No wonder so many of us fail to keep a good habit going for 365 straight days.

So we make a suggestion for a very achievable goal for 2025 that is easy and guaranteed to make your life better: Keep a journal.

It takes a few minutes each day, but the daily practice will make you happier, more mindful, more present, more grateful and better equipped to process trauma. That will make you healthier too, both physically and mentally.

We’re partial to a five-year, line-a-day journal.

It takes no time at all to jot down a few lines about what you did or how you felt that day. There’s no need to be Walt Whitman or Joan Didion. Write in incomplete sentences, fragments. Include your own hand-drawn emojis. Note people you saw that day, or what the weather was like. Note how many fish you caught or runs you skied. Note the bad thing that threw you off, or the good thing that brought you back together.

For awhile, it may not seem like much more than homework. But once the jots become habit, you’ll notice something remarkable. You’ll notice the rhythms of your life, the things that you return to and care about, the things that you spend too much time on that barely register at the end of the day.

If you keep up the practice for a whole year, you’ll get to restart your journal on page 1. Then, along with doing your daily writing, you’ll get to enjoy reading your thoughts and actions of a year prior. You’ll be astounded by how funny and witty you were, about how much you got done, about how you conquered some long-gone obstacle, or about how much time you wasted on a problem that wasn’t one. You might even see your suffering and rejoice in having a year’s distance from it.

In the long run, spending a few minutes with a journal every night is the best way to mark the passage of a day. It’s the best way to remember a little something from time that, as we get older, seems to whoosh by faster and faster and faster.