1. Swim

I used to swim all the bloody time. I love swimming. Em often likens me to a penguin - graceful in water, a malco-ordinated fool on land. And yet these days I never do it, and it shows - my body is in a wretched state.

This is partly because my job leaves precious little time for it, and partly because of the year I've had. About six months ago I started showing symptoms of wheat intolerance or coeliac disease, and started on an exclusion diet which left me underweight and lethargic.

It now looks like I've got IBS, which is much less serious, but I still only have a fraction of the strength or energy I once did. A new year is as good a reason as any to stop feeling self-pity and start fixing myself.

For once I've actually started as I mean to go on - I've just come back from the pool. It was great. Though you can tell when it's the school holidays - the water tastes saltier than usual. Unpleasant but true.

2. Be more grateful for my job

I consider it to be one of my strengths that I'm never really satisfied with how things are, either in my own life or the world at large. That's not the same thing as not being happy, just a recognition that things can always be better. Without it there can be no ambition, or drive to improve things and solve problems, which to my mind is a far sorrier way to live even if it does imply perfect contentment.

But it can be taken too far. I spent altogether too much time last year wishing that I was doing something more exciting than writing for New Model Adviser. I shouldn't have. NMA is a fine magazine with a healthy community of devoted readers, and I was damn lucky to get it as my first job. It's not All the President's Men or The Insider, but then the fact that those two films were made is a testament to how rare that kind of journalism is.

Instead I should have spent more time thinking about the amount of stuff I was learning, the variety of work I was doing, and the quantity of free booze I was consuming. None of them should be taken for granted.

Anyway, when I go back to work on Monday my job will have changed. I'm no longer on NMA, but will instead be responsible for Citywire's video output across all the different editions of the website. It's a golden opportunity and I have a lot of ideas for the site, more on which at a later date.

3. See people more often

I'm lousy at keeping in touch with people, and last year I was worse than usual. Emma's slightly better, and since most of our friends are mutual I let her arrange my social life, but there's plenty of people I haven't seen in years that I would love to have a beer with.

4. Learn to play the harmonica

I don't know why I have a harmonica. I can't remember ever buying it or being given it. But for whatever reason it's right here in front of me, and I'd love to be able to play it. I pick it up from time to time and stumble through Baa Baa Black Sheep or Mary Had A Little Lamb (sheep-related songs are easy to memorise, you see), but I ain't no Huey Lewis.

On a similar note (pun wholly intended) I've been meaning to relearn to play the trombone. I put it on display in the lounge thinking I'd casually pick it up now and then, but the only time I play it is when people come round, see it, and cajole me into doing so. And it just sounds like a wet out-of-tune fart.

I know that I'm never going to lead my own band on a world tour or provide the rousing counterpoint to Rule Britannia at the Last Night of the Proms, but it would be shame to squander the hours I spent practising as a child. That's not how a youth is supposed to be mis-spent.

5. Blog more

I started this blog on 31 March last year. In the nine months since I have made 29 posts, ranging from the mildly pointless to the utterly banal. That's slightly more than three a month.

Which is pathetic.

You may wonder why I've bothered with even that many, since this is largely an echo chamber - by far my most avid reader is Google's indexing bot. But even for a narcissist like me there is a purpose to this beyond self-publicity. Blogging forces you to sit down and engage with your own thoughts, and I'm a firm believer (though you may find the evidence lacking) that it sharpens writing skills, particularly the ones that wither and die when you spend your working day obeying the 'pyramid rule' and fretting about nut grafs longer than 24 words.

You can be a good writer and a lousy journalist, but I don't believe it's possible to be a good journalist if you're a lousy writer, so those skills are important to nurture.

More generally I'd like to spend more time working on this website - its innards are in need of a spring clean, and I'd like to reacquaint myself with some of the technical stuff behind it (PHP, Javascript, SQL) otherwise learning it in the first place was a waste of time.

So there, I've committed myself.

I invite you to do the same - make your resolutions a matter of public record in the comments below, so you'll be jolted into action when you chance upon this post in a few months. Yes, I'm talking to you, Google-bot.