My most used and most terrifying app on my phone is the bewildering swamp wilderness of the Notes app. For those unaware, the app has a simple function – it’s a place to jot down notes. It’s like a notebook but on your phone. A simple way to organise your life across your various devices. Genius!

And yet nothing causes me more existential dread than my Notes app because, for years now, instead of creating an ordered system of lists and separate topic-defined notes, I have shoved every single thought and message and draft and recipe and quote and password into one lumbering, behemoth note. A method of organisation turned into a scary hoarder’s lair, full of trash and secrets (my wifi password is in there, as well as several polite breakup texts).

It’s hundreds and hundreds of pages long, so hard to find anything important that it’s almost unusable, and is often hilarious in its contrasts. One memorable moment was copying a carefully worded answer to a job application from my giant note and accidentally pasting in the ingredient list for a Sri Lankan curry. Why am I perfect for this role? Cumin and garam masala, of course. I also regularly use it for work – a pithy celebrity quote I’ve taken from an article, sitting next to a middle-of-the-night concept for a novel about “huge sassy birds” and my tax file number.

Almost tanking my job prospects via curry has been a wake-up call, so my resolution for 2025 is to finally destroy my giant note and create some order out of the chaos.

There’s a superstition that says the manner in which you celebrate your New Year’s Eve sets the tone for the year to follow – so, if you’re surrounded by family and loved ones, you’ll spend the year blessed with the same situation. If you’re partying and dancing and smooching strangers on a dancefloor, you’ll have an adventurous 2025. Last New Year’s Eve I drank alone and force-fed my greyhound Valium while he shivered and cried every time a firework went off. That’s a good enough description of my 2024 to give credence to this theory.

It’s also because of this concept that I’ve stopped setting myself new year resolutions – it seems a bad precedent to set yourself up for so much flagrant disappointment at the top of the year. We all know I’m not going to “get into hiking” or “understand superannuation” or “become less vengeful”. I don’t want to spend the entire year knowing I’ve failed, that I have a delusional goal hanging over my head.

Instead of trying to undertake herculean tasks like becoming a reward points person or reading a book a week, or tackling giant existential concepts like “becoming more social” or being incredibly boring and doing any kind of exercise- or diet-related resolution, for the past few years I’ve started creating “new year’s treats” instead. The basic concept is to give myself something small, achievable and mostly unimportant to attempt in the new year. Last year my goal was to try lemon-flavoured yoghurt. I did and it was *drumroll* quite nice.

It seems as though more and more people have decided to move away from the upsetting pressure of big new year goals. On social media there’s a new trend for “2025 bingo cards”. These act almost as a kind of vision board and can even provide a balance between more aspirational resolutions and the lemon yoghurt-style goals. The nice thing about this is it implies that you’ll never achieve all the goals – just enough to get a bingo. On the other hand, the spectre of an unfulfilled bingo card at the end of the year will be just as, if not more, depressing.

Originally, I thought my resolution to destroy my Notes app was small, insignificant, even cute – a digital lemon yoghurt, a fun little task that might help me organise my life more. But as we tick over into 2025, I’m filled with a familiar dread at the concept.

While the Notes app is small, it is symbolic, and I’ve accidentally fallen into the trap of thinking I can exert control over the chaos of existence through sheer new year resolution-based tenacity. And what does my swollen and lumbering Notes app represent if not the symptoms of a large and silly and busy life? Maybe it’s not a problem but something I should be proud of. Maybe instead of deleting my app, I’ll embrace it.

Maybe instead of setting myself up for another failure, I’ll write my new year resolution in my even bigger note and, at the end of 2025, I’ll try to scroll all the way back and see which new flavour of yoghurt I’ve failed to try this year.

• Patrick Lenton is a writer. His romcom, In Spite of You, comes out in 2025