Time to make — and break — your resolutions

If it's early in the day as you read this, you may still be making New Year's resolutions for 2006.

Actually, I suppose the efficient among you could have made and broken your resolutions already. For example, if you're eating a doughnut for breakfast, that diet resolution is probably a goner.

But if you did make a promise to yourself to lose a few unwanted pounds this year, you are not alone, according to annual resolutions predictions from myGoals.com.

The Arizona-based company, which operates a Web site for setting and reaching personal and professional goals, bases its predictions on an anonymous, random sample of goals set by visitors to the site. And it shows that 31 percent plan to focus on health and fitness in 2006, up from 26 percent in 2005.

"People's concerns have returned to their waistlines, now more than ever," said Greg Helmstetter, CEO of myGoals.com, in a prepared statement.

While health and fitness is always the most common category of goals tracked by the site, the past two years have shown an increase in its popularity.

"At 31 percent of all goals set, this is the highest level of interest in health and fitness that we've seen in the six years that we've been tracking goals," Helmstetter said.

According to myGoals.com, other top resolution categories for 2006 will be career at 15 percent and personal finance at 15 percent, both up from their 2005 levels. The biggest drop among goals this year was for time management and organization, which fell from 13 percent in 2005 to 8 percent this year.

The company also lists some actual goals people have set in these categories, including "to write and sell a screenplay" and "to become a CPA" in the career category and "to pay off my debt" and "to make $12,000 per month" in the personal finance category.

Hmmm. I don't know about writing a screenplay or becoming a CPA, but 12 grand a month doesn't sound so bad!

Of course, the chances of me making $12,000 a month as a journalist are not good. Which leads me to believe that perhaps I should forego the annual resolving ritual — at least in that category.

Salt Lake-based training and productivity company FranklinCovey is advocating that approach.