5 Mistakes That Make You Quit Your New Year’s Resolutions | Dramel Notes

I used to be a quitter. Every day would be filled with false starts and high ambitions, and I might even make a lot of progress towards whatever goal I had in mind at the time, but ultimately I would always give up before reaching said goals.

The New Year Resolution season is upon us, and many of us are hoping that this year will be the year where everything turns around. You’re going to exercise every day. You’re going to lose 50 pounds. You’re going to launch that new business idea. But more likely than not, you’re just going to quit.

Here’s how I stopped being a quitter. It wasn’t easy, and it took a while to get to the point where I actually finished a project, but it was certainly worthwhile. Want to stop quitting? Avoid these killer mistakes.

1. You Have No Routine

The entire “New Year Resolution” phenomenon essentially boils down to habit-making, and habits are built over time. The opposite is true, too: bad habits are dismantled over time. Your job is to contribute a little bit each and every day until those habits are built (or dismantled).

The proper way to do this is to create a routine. And as counter-intuitive as it may sound, this is especially important if your resolution goals are creative. Here are several free habit-changing apps that can help:

• Habit Streak: Daily goal tracker that helps you maintain streaks over long periods of time. Available on Android.
• Rewire: Another app for building streaks, but with a bit more flexibility than Habit Streak. Available on Android.
• QuitNow!: Specifically for those trying to quit smoking. Available on Android, iOS, and Windows Phone.
• Lose It!: Specifically for those trying to lose weight. Available on Android, iOS, and Web.
• Pact: Specifically for those trying to build fitness and diet habits. It is unique as Pact will pay you if you keep your streaks, but cost you money if you don’t. Available on Android and iOS.

Routines can be a pain, but here’s the good news: habits can form or break in just 21 days. All you have to do is hold out for three weeks and you’ll find it much easier to stay on track towards your goals.

However, this doesn’t mean you’ll be immune to giving up, so always stick to the routine. The routine is invaluable because it keeps you honest even when you feel like quitting.

2. You Aren’t Skilled Enough

If your New Year Resolution involves learning a new technical skill, then there’s a good chance that you’re going to feel overwhelmed by the learning curve at some point — and when that inevitably happens, you’re going to want to quit.

This is a huge issue for newbies who are trying to learn how to program, which tends to manifest as programmer’s block. But really, it could happen for any skilled pursuit: photography, digital art, web design, or even woodworking. When your ability lags behind your vision, you become frustrated.

Fortunately, you can overcome this with a solid training plan. Instead of deciding to “learn 3D animation”, take some time and outline what your progression will look like. A goal-based vision board can be quite useful for this.

But at the end of the day, you’re frustrated because you simply aren’t skilled enough, and the only way around this is to keep learning, keep practicing, and keep sticking to your routine.

Need help with your training? Check out these photography YouTube channels, these photography Lynda.com courses, these web design YouTube channels, these digital art Lynda.com courses, and last but not least, these woodworking YouTube channels.

3. Your Goals Are Poorly Defined

Few things are as detrimental to progress than a poorly-defined goal. Here’s what a poorly-defined goal looks like:

• “I want to lose weight”
• “I will learn how to draw”
• “I’m going to start an Etsy business”

Why are these bad? Because they’re lofty, big, long-term, vague, abstract, and lacking urgency. For example, at what point will I be able to say, “I now know how to draw”? At this point, this goal is no more than a concept or wish.

A properly-defined goal — also known as a S.M.A.R.T. goal — has all five of the following characteristics:

1. Specific: The goal should clearly outline the action that you’re going to take rather than the end result that you want. “Learn to draw” is abstract, but “Practice drawing portraits” is specific.
2. Measurable: The goal should be clear enough that you can say whether or not you’ve reached it. “Practice drawing portraits” is vague, but “Practice drawing portraits 7 times a week” is measurable.
3. Achievable: The goal must be difficult enough to put you outside your comfort zone, but not so difficult as to be discouraging. “7 times a week” is tough, “Once a week” isn’t enough, but “3 times a week” is good.
4. Relevant: The goal must be in line with the broader, longer-term goals you have in mind.
5. Timely: The goal must be attainable in the short-term. If it takes too long, you’re likely to lose steam before you get there.

Here’s a short rule of thumb: a properly-defined goal is one that can be checked off from a to-do list within 24-72 hours. As such, to-do lists make excellent supplementary tools to the habit-forming goal trackers mentioned above.

• Todoist: Simple but effective to-do list with an intuitive interface. It gets even better with Todoist premium features, too.
• Trello: Card-based interface makes it great for complex tasks that require notes and annotations.
• Wunderlist: The simplest to-do list of them all. Works particularly well on mobile devices.
• WorkFlowy: Unique take on the to-do list concept, allowing you to clear away distractions while you work on certain tasks.

The best part about S.M.A.R.T. goals is that they play a double role: not only are they better for tracking progress, but they act as micro habits that encourage behavioral momentum. This is key to overcoming the tendency to quit.

4. You Have Too Many Goals

One big paradox is that highly ambitious and motivated people tend to have too many goals, resulting in paralysis as they struggle to commit. When you want too many things, you could end up in an endless cycle of quitting-and-restarting.

In other words, indecision can kill your progress overnight.

Fortunately, indecision is a curable disease. Once you understand the psychology of indecision and why you have so much trouble committing, it becomes easier to pick and choose which goals really matter to you — but the problem won’t solve itself.

There are only so many hours in a day, so if you really want to commit to a new goal, then you must sacrifice something else in its place: watch less Netflix, relinquish responsibilities at work, give up a personal hobby, etc.

But which goals should you pursue and which ones should you give up? That’s up to you. However, if you’re having trouble, here are a few apps that can help you make those tough decisions:

• Decision Buddy: This Android app guides you through the decision making process, streamlining everything and making sure you take the route that matters most to you.
• ChoiceMap: Similar in practice to Decision Buddy, except only available for iOS.
• Ultimate Decision Maker: If you need to flip a coin, this app is for you. It can also roll dice, spin wheels, and more. Random decision making has never been easier.
• Draw.IO: Flowcharts can simplify decisions, and this Web app is both excellent and free.

If you don’t want to give up anything, then you can compromise by postponing secondary goals instead. For example, instead of learning three new things at once, try spreading them out across the year.

Whatever you do, just make sure that you don’t overdo it by working too hard and sacrificing your health in the process.

5. You’re Afraid to Fail

The number one reason why creatives quit the pursuit of their dreams? Fear of failure. If you feel like you aren’t good enough or that your work sucks or that you could never be a good [insert goal here], then you know what I’m talking about.

Take this to heart: you are not alone!

Many TED Talks on creativity exist, but there’s one that we want to highlight. Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Your Elusive Creative Genius” presentation is a must-watch for anyone struggling with the fear of creative failure:

The fear of failure also extends beyond the creative. For example, many people stop going to the gym because they think they’ll never be able to achieve the weight, strength, or body definition that they truly want — and so they quit.

But fear is good. The ability to take calculated risks is one thing that separates those who grow from those who stall. In fact, every successful entrepreneur knows that staying within one’s comfort zone is the recipe for stagnation.

It all comes down to how we think. For most of us, lack of success means failure — but is that true? Perhaps there’s a better way to think about success and failure.

Will You Quit This Year, Too?

Quitting is easy. Trust me, I know. I’ve quit hundreds of projects, hobbies, and pursuits over the past decade and I have a lot of regrets because of that. But these are the lessons that have helped me outgrow that mentality, and I hope they help you, too.

How tough is your struggle with New Year Resolutions? Got any tips for success? What can we do to avoid the never-ending quit cycle? Tell us in the comments below!

Image Credits: Sitting young man looking by Kamenetskiy Konstantin via Shutterstock, Digital Art Practice by Diego Cervo via Shutterstock, New Year Resolutions by marekuliasz via Shutterstock, Business cartoon by Cartoon Resource via Shutterstock

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HTG Explains: Everything You Know About Resolution Is Probably Wrong | Dramel Notes

“Resolution” is a term people often throw around—sometimes incorrectly—when talking about images. This concept is not as black and white as “the number of pixels in an image.” Keep reading to find out what you don’t know.

As with most things, when you dissect a popular term like “resolution” to an acedemic (or geeky) level, you find that it’s not as simple as you might have been lead to believe. Today we’re going to see just how far the concept of “resolution” goes, briefly talk about the implications of the term, and a little bit about what higher resolution means in graphics, printing, and photography.

So, Duh, Images Are Made of Pixels, Right?

Here’s the way you’ve probably had resolution explained to you: images are an array of pixels in rows and columns, and images have a pre-defined number of pixels, and bigger images with bigger number of pixels have better resolution… right? That’s why you’re so tempted by that 16 megapixel digital camera, because lots of pixels is the same as high resolution, right? Well, not exactly, because resolution is a little bit murkier than that. When you talk about an image like it’s only a bucket of pixels, you ignore all the other things that go into making an image better in the first place. But, without a doubt, one part of what makes an image “high resolution” is having a lot of pixels to create a recognizable image.

It can be convenient (but sometimes wrong) to call images with lots of megapixels “high resolution.” Because resolution goes beyond the number of pixels in an image, it would be more accurate to call it an image with high pixel resolution, or high pixel density. Pixel density is measured in pixels per inch (PPI), or sometimes dots per inch (DPI). Because pixel density is a measure of dots relative to an inch, one inch can have ten pixels in it or a million. And the images with higher pixel density will be able to resolve detail better—at least to a point.

The somewhat misguided idea of “high megapixel = high resolution” is a sort of carryover from the days when digital images simply couldn’t display enough image detail because there weren’t enough of the little building blocks to make up a decent image. So as digital displays started to have more picture elements (also known as pixels), these images were able to resolve more detail and give a clearer picture of what was going on. At a certain point, the need for millions and millions of more picture elements stops being helpful, as it reaches the upper limit of the other ways that the detail in an image is resolved. Intrigued? Let’s take a look.

Optics, Details, and Resolving Image Data

Another important part of the resolution of an image relates directly to the way it is captured. Some device has to parse and record image data from a source. This is the way most kinds of images are created. It also applies to most digital imaging devices (digital SLR cameras, scanners, webcams, etc) as well as analog methods of imaging (like film-based cameras). Without getting into too much technical gobbledygook about how cameras work,  we can talk about something called “optical resolution.”

Simply said, resolution, in regard to any kind of imaging, means “ability to resolve detail.” Here’s a hypothetical situation: you buy a fancy-pants, super high-megapixel camera, but have trouble taking sharp pictures because the lens is terrible. You just can’t focus it, and It takes blurry shots that lack detail. Can you call your image high resolution? You might be tempted to, but you can’t. You can think of this as what optical resolution means. Lenses or other means of gathering optical data have upper limits to the amount of detail they can capture. They can only capture so much light based on form factor (a wide angle lens versus a telephoto lens), as the factor and style of lens allows in more or less light.

Light also has a tendency to diffract and/or create distortions of light waves called aberrations. Both create distortions of image details by keeping light from focusing accurately to create sharp pictures. The best lenses are formed to limit diffraction and therefore provide a higher upper limit of detail, whether the target image file has the megapixel density to record the detail or not. A Chromatic Aberration, illustrated above, is when different wavelengths of light (colors) move at different speeds through a lens to converge on different points. This means that colors are distorted, detail is possibly lost, and images are recorded inaccurately based on these upper limits of optical resolution.

Digital photosensors also have upper limits of ability, although it’s tempting to just assume that this only has to do with megapixels and pixel density. In reality, this is another murky topic, full of complex ideas worthy of an article of its own. It is important to keep in mind that there are weird trade-offs for resolving detail with higher megapixel sensors, so we’ll go further in depth for a moment. Here’s another hypothetical situation—you chunk out your older high-megapixel camera for a brand new one with twice as many megapixels. Unfortunately, you buy one at the same crop factor as your last camera and run into trouble when shooting in low light environments. You lose lots of detail in that environment and have to shoot in super fast ISO settings, making your images grainy and ugly. The trade off is this—your sensor has photosites, little tiny receptors that capture light. When you pack more and more photosites onto a sensor to create a higher megapixel count, you lose the beefier, bigger photosites capable of capturing more photons, which will help to render more detail in those low light environments.

Because of this reliance on limited light-recording media and limited light-gathering optics, resolution of detail can be achieved through other means. This photo is an image by Ansel Adams, renown for his achievements in creating High Dynamic Range images using dodging and burning techniques and ordinary photo papers and films. Adams was a genius at taking limited media and using it to resolve the maximum amount of detail possible, effectively sidestepping many of the limitations we talked about above. This method, as well as tone-mapping, is a way to increase the resolution of an image by bringing out details that might otherwise not be seen.

Resolving Detail and Improving Imaging and Printing

Because “resolution” is such a broad-reaching term, it also has impacts in the printing industry. You’re probably aware that advances in the past several years have made televisions and monitors higher definition (or at least made higher def monitors and televisions more commercially viable). Similar imaging technology revolutions have been improving the quality of images in print—and yes, this too is “resolution.”

When we’re not talking about your office inkjet printer, we’re usually talking about processes that create halftones, linetones, and solid shapes in some kind of intermediary material used for transferring ink or toner to some kind of paper or substrate. Or, more simply put, “shapes on a thing that puts ink on another thing.” The image printed above was most likely printed with some kind of offset lithography process, as were most of the color images in books and magazines in your home. Images are reduced to rows of dots and put onto a few different printing surfaces with a few different inks and are recombined to create printed images.

The printing surfaces are usually imaged with some kind of photosensitive material which has a resolution of its own. And one of the reasons that print quality has improved so drastically over the last decade or so is the increased resolution of improved techniques. Modern offset presses have increased resolution of detail because they utilize precise computer-controlled laser imaging systems, similar to the ones in your office variety laser printer. (There are other methods, as well, but laser is arguably the best image quality.) Those lasers can create smaller, more accurate, more stable dots and shapes, which create better, richer, more seamless, more high-resolution prints based on printing surfaces capable of resolving more detail. Take a moment to look at prints done as recently as those from the early 90s and compare them to modern ones—the leap in resolution and print quality is quite staggering.

Don’t Confuse Monitors and Images

It can be quite easy to lump the resolution of images in with the resolution of your monitor. Don’t be tempted, just because you look at images on your monitor, and both are associated with the word “pixel.” It might be confusing, but pixels in images have variable pixel depth (DPI or PPI, meaning they can have variable pixels per inch) while monitors have a fixed number of physically wired, computer-controlled points of color that are used to display the image data when your computer asks it to. Really, one pixel is not related to another. But they can both be called “picture elements,” so they both get called “pixels.” Said simply, the pixels in images are a way of recording image data, while the pixels in monitors are ways to display that data.

What does this mean? Generally speaking, when you’re talking about the resolution of monitors, you’re talking about a far more clear-cut scenario than with image resolution. While there are other technologies (none of which we’ll discuss today) that can improve image quality—simply put, more pixels on a display add to the display’s ability to resolve the detail more accurately.

In the end, you can think of the images you create as having an ultimate goal—the medium you’re going to use them on. Images with extremely high pixel density and pixel resolution (high megapixel images captured from fancy digital cameras, for instance) are appropriate for use from a very pixel dense (or “printing dot” dense) printing medium, like an inkjet or an offset press because there’s a lot of detail for the high resolution printer to resolve. But images intended for the web have much lower pixel density because monitors have roughly 72 ppi pixel density and almost all of them top out around 100 ppi. Ergo, only so much “resolution” can be viewed on screen, yet all of the detail that is resolved can be included in the actual image file.

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The simple bullets point to take away from this is that “resolution” is not as simple as using files with lots and lots of pixels, but is usually a function of resolving image detail. Keeping that simple definition in mind, simply remember that there are many aspects to creating a high resolution image, with pixel resolution being only one of them. Thoughts or questions about today’s article? Let us know about them in the comments, or simply send your questions to ericgoodnight@howtogeek.com.

Image Credits: Desert Girl by bhagathkumar Bhagavathi, Creative Commons. Lego Pixel art by Emmanuel Digiaro, Creative Commons. Lego Bricks by Benjamin Esham, Creative Commons. D7000/D5000 B&W by Cary and Kacey Jordan, Creative Commons. Chromatic Abbertation diagrams by Bob Mellish and DrBob, GNU License via Wikipedia. Sensor Klear Loupe by Micheal Toyama, Creative Commons. Ansel Adams image in public domain. Offset by Thomas Roth, Creative Commons. RGB LED by Tyler Nienhouse, Creative Commons.

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The Easiest Way to Fix Blurry Fonts in Windows 10 | Dramel Notes

If you’ve messed around with the DPI scaling option on your high-resolution display — in an attempt to make things easier to read — then it can sometimes come with a negative side effect: blurry fonts. (And unfortunately, it’s just one of several potential font issues in Windows 10.)

This happens because of the scaling method used by Microsoft in the newer versions of Windows. While the text will most certainly be bigger, the fidelity may be sacrificed to rescale. But not to worry, because you can fix it and bring back the sharpness to your text without making it tiny and impossible to read!

Worried that you’ll have to dig into the system registry to solve the issue? That’s one way to do it, but it isn’t a permanent or easy fix. Instead, your best bet is to download XPExplorer’s Windows 10 DPI Fix and let it handle everything.

All you need to do is download the file and run the .EXE. A small box will open, and in it you’ll be choosing between Windows 10 default DPI scaling and Windows 8.1 DPI scaling. The latter is the one that will fix your blurry font problem.

You can also use the dropdown menu to change the actual scaling to work with the size you need. Make sure to restart your computer in order to see the changes.

Did you run to the eye doctor for a new prescription when you first discovered blurry fonts when you upgraded to Windows 10? Share your story in the comments!

Image Credit: PathDoc via ShutterStock

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