Every time we set out to do something, we invariably sense in ourselves a level of interest towards doing that which lies somewhere on the spectrum from "I don't want to do this one bit" to "I'm really excited about doing this". 

This natural compass is useful, firstly to understand how we feel about things. 

However, we need to be careful about relying on this because this is a momentary sense. It indicates how we feel about something at the moment we are thinking about it. 

This sense would be more reliable if we could average our feeling towards a certain thing over a period of time and take as many samples as we can. But, this too, has it's downsides as something drastic may have happened in recent history making all the samples before it quite unrelated. Besides, our minds are completely incapable of doing such math for everything that we come across. After all, this is an unconscious sense and not a rational evaluation. 

But, if we set aside some time dedicated to thinking about how we feel about various things, we can do such math and make it a rational evaluation. 

Once we do that, we can then ignore the momentary sense when it shows up and tell ourselves to either do or not do something even if our momentary sense is crying out to the contrary.

Listing down New Year's resolutions is one such activity that falls under such a category of taking time out to think rationally about how we feel about certain things. Like exercising more often. Or eating healthier. 

Left to the momentary sense, we are pretty much doomed. 

New Year's resolutions are all about taming the momentary sense. 

Wish you a Happy New Year and hope you succeed in taming your momentary sense as much as you can this year.