On setting and accomplishing new year resolutions

I’ve been setting new year resolutions for quite some time now. While working on my list for this year, I got the following list from one of the people I follow on twitter:

  • Build an iPhone app
  • Drink more water
  • Build core strength (Yoga / Pilates)
  • Travel internationally (Taiwan, Japan, or Thailand)
  • Take a cooking class
  • Train my dog to walk off leash
  • Learn to play the Shakuhachi flute
  • Meditate weekly
  • More live screencasts
  • Start a small saltwater aquarium

I think there’s some room for improvement on this list. Not only can the goals be stated clearer, but each should be categorized and tackled in a different way in order to make sure we complete them.

So if your listing is similar, or if you don’t have a list yet, read on:

The types of resolutions that people make

I think, overall, there are 5 kinds of resolutions that people add to their list:

  • Goals - things you work little by little until you achieve them: save this much money, earn that much money, lose this many pounds, etc.
  • Projects - things you work with the objective of completing/launching/shipping: write a book, write an iPhone app, build a company
  • Habits - new things you want to do consistently: drink more water, exercise frequently, call parents regularly
  • Learning - things you want to learn: learn to play the piano, learn to cook
  • Doing - things you want to do: travel to asia, bungee jump, sky dive

If you don’t approach each of these in a different way, you’re very likely to fail on them. So here’s how I suggest you approach each:

Goals

All the goals should be able to be tracked for progress, and have a very clear way to say ‘I’ve reached this goal’.

‘Lose weight’ is not a good goal, unless you’re weighting 330lbs and think you can mark your goal as done when you get to 329lbs. So usually, goals need to have a number associated to them, or something else you can measure.

When working towards goals, its imperative that you track how well you’re doing across time. Use the end of every week or every month, depending on the goal, to add your current status to a spreadsheet, and to see how much progress you have and if you are on the right track.

Most importantly, don’t quit your goal if you’re not on the right track. A lot of people make this mistake: if you have a goal to save $10k this month, but can only save $1k per month and there’s only 9 months left, you should resist the temptation to say ‘its over, I’ll just spend my savings’ or ‘its over, there’s no point tracking it anymore’. Getting close to your goal can really feel almost as good as actually reaching it, and you never know what surprises await you along the way.

Projects

Projects are goals that are an end in themselves, not necessarily in their results. It is something you create, but you don’t want to associate the results of that creation impact or performance with your goal, but only the creation itself. Usually, because that’s already challenging enough.

Writing a book is probably one of the most common failed projects you’ll see on new year resolutions. You could of course trace that back to the reason most personal projects fail, which really deserve a post of its own.

Though, I think the best way to tackle such tasks is with a ‘consistency calendar’. Jerry Seinfield’s “don’t break the chain” was the first to show the importance of being consistent. And although being consistent is good for learning new things and creating habits, it really shines when doing project work.

The reason consistency is essential is that personal projects tend to fight with everything else that’s happening to us for our time. Given their long term nature, they usually lose. When you sit down to work on your project just so you can keep being consistent, something happens and suddenly working on it has a lot more weight than it did before when fighting with the other things. So, what usually happens is that people sit to work on it for 30 minutes, and stop only hours later. The hard part was getting started.

I’m a believer that most projects of this nature fail not because the person was technically unable to do it, but just because he didn’t put in the time necessary. A consistency calendar fixes that.

Habits

Habits are arguably the trickiest to achieve, because you can’t really tell when you’ve finally ‘acquired’ a habit. If you have a goal like ‘drink more water’, when do you say ‘Ok, I’ve finally reached it’ ?

Consistency calendars are great for tracking habits and making sure you stick to them, but the necessary tool to actually reach the goal is to set boundaries and a timeline.

So, suppose you want to exercise more often. If you set a goal to have the habit of ‘exercise regularly’, you’re likely to, even if you are actually exercising regularly, not really knowing when you reached your goal, and this can help you lose motivation to stick to it, not to mention you not being able to tick it off your year resolutions list.

So instead, write something like ‘Exercise 3 times/week for at least 2 months’. This way, there’s a very direct way to know if you are exercising according to your definition of regularly, to know how long it should take for you to be happy to call that a ‘habit’, and plenty of room to fix the course in case you slip.

Making sure you build a list like ‘24 exercises total’, and then ticking them down to ‘23 to go’, ‘22 to go’, can be really helpful in making sure you actually reach your goal.

After you’re done, in all likelihood, just sticking to your methods should help you maintain your habit indefinitely. It should also be a period long enough for you to judge if you even want to stick to it at all.

Learning

This one is tricky as well. If you have a goal to ‘learn to play the piano’ or ‘learn how to cook’, how do you know when you’ve reached them? When you play your first song or cook your first meal? When you play your first chopin music, or improvise your first jazz?

There are different approaches to this: Define it as an event like ‘Play in a piano recital’ or ‘Cook dinner for at least other 5 friends’, define it as an action with a timeline like ‘enroll in a japanese class for a year’, or in amount of hours like ‘practice the guitar for 100h’.

My personal preference is the amount of hours approach, but each has its own strengths and weaknesses. Not every learning goal can be converted to an event, and sometimes just an event doesn’t mean you’ve adequately ‘learned’ it even for your own standards. Enrolling in a course can be as bad as rephrasing ‘learning brazillian jiu jitsu’ to ‘enroll in a BJJ gym’, but missing practice often. 

For these reasons, even though you can spend a lot of time on something without necessarily learning it (as has been made clear multiple times), I think its still the best way to actually phrase goals for learning something and still achieving it while having acquired the skills you planned to.

Doing

These sort of goals really usually involve some preconditions, and then just actually doing what we wanted to. People usually get the phrasing of these goals right, like “travel to Asia” or “do a checkup”. Its the tracking that really trips up people in not accomplishing them.

First, some of these goals depend on a precondition that’s really a goal to be achieved, and should be treated as such. “Traveling” usually requires saving enough funds to do it (for most people), so if you don’t break that into a goal and treat it as such, chances are you’ll never travel indeed.

Aside from goals, there are usually other ‘tasks’ that are involved with these ‘Doing’ goals and that don’t have preconditions. I case of traveling these usually involve ‘Get a visa’, ‘buy tickets’, etc.

It’s funny because, from all the types of goals, ‘Doing’ types are usually the easiest to accomplish (assuming they don’t have hard goals as pre-requisites), and people still have a hard time accomplishing them.

The best way to make sure they get done is to schedule them. Most of these types of goals can be scheduled ahead of time, and scheduling them ‘literaly’ - as in, calling your travel agency, buying your plane tickets, calling your lab and scheduling your checkup - is the best way to make sure you actually get around doing them. 

We’ll usually wait for the moment when we feel inspired and say “Ok! This weekend I’ll finally do my checkup”. Guess what? This will probably never happen. But, if next monday you call your lab or hospital and say “Hi, I want to schedule a full checkup”, chance are when it’s actually time to go to it, even though you don’t feel too much like it, you’ll actually go and get that off your list.

What a good new year resolutions list looks like

You’re way more likely to achieve your goals by realizing their differences and using the techniques most useful for tackling each type of goal.

With the above in mind, here’s how I’d rephrase our example list:

Goals: Do 12 live screencast episodes

Projects: Build an iPhone app, Start a small saltwater aquarium

Habits: Drink 2L of water/day at least 5wks/day for 2 months, Do Yoga 2days/wk for at least 2 months, Meditate once a week for at least 2 months

Learning: Practice cooking for 20h (20 classes 1h/each), Practice shakuhachi flute for 50h

Doing: Travel to Taiwan, Japan or Thailand, Enroll dog in training course

Now you know what type each kind of goal is, and should know how to proceed on making sure each is achieved in its own terms.