Resolutions are crash dieting for goals

• December 31, 2011
• 1 note
• #goals
• #resolutions
• #productivity

Ever go to the gym during the first week of January? It’s packed; but go back 2 weeks later it’s a ghost town again. Okay, not everyone fails at their resolutions, but some quick googling says that 80% of resolutionistas give up on their big, life changing resolution by January 20th.

Now, I know you shouldn’t believe everything that you read on the internet, but I’m inclined the believe that stat. Resolutions are like a joke that you play on yourself every year. “This year will be different! I’ll lose that 20 pounds”

Don’t make resolutions

I haven’t made a New Years Resolution in 4 years- instead, I’ve created a more realistic “yearly goal” system that I think works quite well.

It all starts with a self-evaluation

Ever year, about a week before Jan 1st, I sit down and write up a self-evaluation of the past year. I create three headings in Evernote- “Good”, “Bad”, and “Has to Change”. These are extremely powerful for both identifying areas of your life that need improvement and for reviewing during years to come. I have 4 years worth of these and it’s incredible to occasional revisit them and concretely see how much I’ve changed course.

Under the Good section, I write a brief summary of any major positive events that have happened in the past year. “Major” is at your discretion- anything major to you belongs in this list- it can be something as obvious as moving across the country or something as insignificant as discovering a new type of music (both of those made my list this year). It’s completely up to you.

The Bad section is for writing any big negative things that happened in your life this year. It doesn’t necessary have to be things that you want to change, or even things that you can control changing- write them down regardless.

Has to Change is the most important section. Here is where you list anything and everything in your life that you’re not happy with, would like to improve on, or would like to start doing. This will help form the basis of your goals, which I’ll talk about next.

Make goals, not resolutions

For me, the next part is the most important- I take my goals and work them into the overly cliche SMART goals. Basically, what I want is to turn each “has to change” into a goal that can reasonably be quantified and measured on a daily basis. A stranger should be able to look at them and answer yes or no about whether you’ve made progress them today. “Start running” is a bad goal. “Build up to running to 30 miles a month” is a good one.

Next, I break out a sheet of paper and create label for each month. For each goal I have, I come up with a “sub-goal” that can be accomplished in that month. The sub-goals should build on each-other and gradually lead to accomplishing the main goal that you set out on. For example, in January my goal might be to “Run 2 miles, 3 days per week”. In February, “Run 10 miles per week”. So on, and so forth. It’s simple, but it works.

Essentially, you accomplish your stretch goals by using a Divide and Conquer strategy- you start small and eventually build up to getting what you want. It’s worth saying that the sub-goals can build on each other in other ways than simply increasing intensity as in my running example. As long as the sub-goals make progress to your end goal they can be anything- even if they are seemingly unrelated at first.