1. I will get up early. How early, I don’t know yet. Four am? Four am sounds rather early. Perhaps I should wake up five minutes earlier each day and wait until I reach a natural equilibrium. If I were to wake up at 4am, there is so much I could do. I could go to the gym. I could write down my Most Important Tasks (MITs) for the day. I could meditate. I could journal about three things I was grateful for. Or I could go back to sleep.
2. I will eat more vegetables. It is so hard to eat vegetables - there aren’t any free ones at work, only fruit. I eat many apples, but few broccoli. In theory, I could buy them at a supermarket near work, but then I would have to prepare them, and that would eat into my lunchbreak. No, what I need to do is to buy them in advance, cut them up and put them in a big box and munch happily on them when the girls who sit opposite me offer me biscuits, I will eat more vegetables and will be full. I will be healthy. I will live longer. I will get in my five a day.
3. I will drink less coffee. At the moment, I have it once I get into work. It’s what motivates me to get out of bed each day. The thing is, once I‘be had one, I get thirsty and have another. My colleagues have bottles of water next to them, refillable ones, and I know I should do the same, but it isn’t as warming as coffee. Tea is warming, too, and also contains caffeine, but if I am having tea, I might as well have coffee instead. I also prefer the thicker consistency of coffee. If I give up coffee, I will need something to replace it. Tea will not do. Neither will water. Smoking. It would give me something to look forward to: I could go to work and immediately go and smoke a cigarette outside. I will make new friends. I will have a new excuse to procrastinate my daily tasks. I will be out in the open air. I will get more exercise for going up and down stairs. My happiness will improve along with my health.
4. I will stop looking at my phone in the evenings. I have been remiss: I have read about what former child stars look like now while my wife has tried to finalise parents’ evening appointments. I have been distracted during her account of her day. No more. I will renounce my phone and my iPad as well, and will not allow the TV to be on. From now on, it will be an ornament only. I will disconnect it at the back so that all the channels have to be tuned in again, which will be a real hassle. My family and I will discuss politics and current affairs. I will learn the names of my daughters’ friends, and my wife will be able to stop repeating herself. We will play board games and sing songs and I will learn to play the guitar. Everyone on the road WhatsApp will talk about what a close family we are, but I won’t know this because I will uninstall WhatsApp from my phone. If we ever run out of things to say to each other, and don’t want to sing songs or play board games, we can read improving books, or make up stories to entertain each other.
5. I will learn to relax. No more of this life of self-improvement: it makes it hard to sleep. I am stressed and irritable all the time from trying to keep up with all the people I read about on Medium. Instead, I will follow the herd. Each night, when I come home, I will switch the TV on and not speak to anyone until I go to bed, and will see that as a better use of my leisure time than learning a language or a musical instrument or reading or writing a book. I won’t cook or speak to my friends: too stressful. Too much hassle. If I ever meet people who appear to be happy with a more active and ambitious lifestyle, I will find a box set on Netflix in which people like that come to a bad end, and will be grateful to my previous self for the choices I have made.
6. I will finally write the novel. I will stop talking about it and will get on and do it. I won’t wait around the perfect plot to arrive like last time - no, I will be like that Nordic Knaussgard chap, and will write about whatever comes to mind, and embarrass my family and everyone who knew me as a child, and many of them won’t speak to me anymore, which will be a relief. You don’t get any likes for working on a novel - nobody else cares, and we all know that it is very hard to get published even when what you churn out is good. I will take part in National Novel Writing Month in November, which means that I can take the other 11 months off, sure in the knowledge that I will get it done in that month. And if it has no plot and no conflict and no characters, no matter - 50,000+ words is a novel because I say it is. Nobody will read it, anyway, because nobody has time to read anything these days, so nobody will be able to tell whether it is any good.
7. Focus on my relationship. I will focus on my relationship with my wife. I hope that this will lead to more sex. My wife rolls her eyes at everything I say. Contempt is said to be a red flag for a marriage. However, I will turn things around. I will stop farting in bed. I will cook occasionally, to reintroduce an element of surprise and spontaneity into our relationship. In return, I expect my wife to tell how handsome I am, to run her fingers along the hairs on my forearm, and say things such as: "You're so funny." 
8. I will be more present. I will stop zoning out during meetings, thinking about killing everyone in turn in my office, except the select few who plead for mercy, and deciding once and for all who the top five most attractive women are in order of hotness. That shouldn't be difficult, since there are only five attractive women in my office. 
9. I will become the best person I can be. I will exercise every day. I will meditate. i will do daily affirmations. I will give to the poor. I will volunteer for the poor. I will become a vegan. Once a year, I will eat onky strawberries for a week to cleanse my system, even if it goves me the squits
10. I will stop lying to myself