This year my list of new year goals was very short and revolved quite a lot around the Playstation, but actually I have been thinking about areas I can reset and get organised, gaining a little bit of control. The first one is subscriptions. I don’t know about you, but I find that subscriptions to various apps, streaming services, and even physical things, can get lost in the wilderness and build up until you’re more out of pocket than you might have thought.

That’s obviously the joy of subscriptions for a business, that people will sign up and then forget about it, but I’m here to say no! Take a minute, use that new year reset motivation, and review your subscriptions. The first place to start is Apple (or other) subscriptions, as they make it super easy to review which apps are taking your money on a regular basis. The best approach is, unless you really need something, then cancel it. If it turns out you do want the subscription back you can sign up again, but otherwise, have that break and consider whether it’s really necessary.

Streaming services are a real problem for me. I continue to love and advocate for how easy it is to get content these days, but do acknowledge the sheer volume of streaming services out there can get seriously expensive. And it’s so easy to add one quickly while you’re watching something, then another to catch up on that other popular thing, and then suddenly you have twelve subscriptions and there are only so many TV watching hours in a day… even at x2 speed.

So for me, that one is definitely a hard reset, get rid of them all and only add them when necessary. The trick is to be able to save up shows you want to watch and then start and stop them as you dip into each one. That takes a level of self-control and organisation that I haven’t quite reached yet but maybe a spreadsheet will help!

And then finally the physical things that are super conveniently delivered to your door. If it’s working, that’s great, but it’s always worth taking stock of whether the timing of delivery is right, if you’re building up stocks of stuff you don’t need, or whether you could just as easily buy as and when you need it on the go. I think if you approach all of these areas with the ‘get rid but feel free to add back if you need it’ attitude, then it’s going to be a really good reset for the coming year.