It’s that time of year when every blog and website about psychology starts giving you the top 10 tips for setting your New Years Resolutions and how to stick to them.

Well I’m going to do something different. Once you’ve set your outcomes, broken them down into short term goals and made a plan of action I want you to think about all the things you are going to start removing from your life.

For example, I sometimes visit a website that provides news and reviews of films, even though I haven’t been to the cinema in years and have never rented a DVD. For some reason I’m spending precious minutes of my life reading about movies I’ll never watch.

So from now on I vow to stop visiting that website.

The idea is that if I start removing all those useless activities from my life I’ll start spending more time doing the things I really want and need to do.

Now the trick of course is to make sure I don’t fill up the time I’ve won with other useless pursuits. I guess some of you watch television so you should consider cutting down on that (or stopping altogether, as I have). For me the main danger is aimless surfing on the internet. Although a bit of random surfing can be useful I think the best thing for me would be to put a time limit on it and enforce the time table I’ve set for my other interests.

The idea is that if I start removing all those useless activities from my life I’ll start spending more time doing the things I really want to do.