We need a retro on resolutions
Every year, we create new year resolutions that seem doomed to fail. What if we iterated on our personal goals the same way we iterate on design processes?
It’s the first week of the new year and resolutions are everywhere. So are the countless studies that report that more than 90% of people who set resolutions fail to keep them. I failed to hit any of my 2022 new year’s resolutions. I reviewed them maybe once a month at best and otherwise just coasted through the year on a spectacular roller coaster of “I’m failing everything” to “It’s all fine”.
But 2022 was by no means a failure. It was a year of love, loss, and learning as with the many years prior. So why don’t resolutions reflect this and why do we keep setting and then failing to keep resolutions in the first place?
What’s keeping us from rocking our resolutions?
On face value, I think there are two easy-to-overcome reasons: we’re using the wrong timeframe and we’re applying the wrong success metrics to new year’s resolutions.
As design leaders, we may set year-long goals but not without weekly, monthly and quarterly checkins with our teams. We regularly run retrospectives on our processes to figure out what worked and what didn’t. We then iterate on not only the customer experiences our teams design but also the ways of working that enable those designs to succeed. When we evaluate success, it’s not just about whether we hit the metric we were aiming for but also about whether that was the right metric in the first place.
When it comes to our own processes and practices, that same level of rigor we apply to our design teams seems to fall away. As personal “goal-setters”, we set a year-long resolution and as soon as we miss one milestone, that resolution is considered a fail and we drop it. At the end of the year, we reflect on resolutions as if they’re binary — we rocked them or we didn’t.
With our teams, we actively encourage growth from failure. With ourselves, we strive for perfectionism and shy away from anything less.
The magic of a mini retrospective
It’s all too easy to dwell on the resolutions you failed to hit, especially when social media spams us with all the “year in review” posts from our friends and colleagues that highlight the wins and hide the fails.
So instead of just moving on from last year with a shiny new set of resolutions you likely won’t keep, start with a mini personal retro. A team retrospective with 4–8 people can take an hour. Why not take just 15 minutes to run a retro with yourself? Ask the same “What worked?” and “What didn’t?” questions before you dive into setting a goal or two for the year.
My mini retro for 2022 though looked something like this:
I did well forming an exercise habit (first thing in the morning on weekends and first thing after meetings on week days) but did poorly restarting that habit after a few missed days and then weeks. I stopped reading and writing for months at a time because I was focused on (and then so frustrated by) my slow pace. I learned that habits are only as good as our ability to restart them. I also learned that reading and writing weren’t the only ways I enjoyed consuming and producing content.
After spending Day 1 of 2023 thinking this would be the year when I would throw all resolutions out the window, I decided to instead focus on how these resolutions might help me both continue and restart the habits I wanted to carry forward from 2022. Here’s a sneak peak at what my mini 2023 retro will look like as a result:
Here’s to the year of the mini retro
Remember that resolutions are all about breaking bad habits. So the aim here is less about reviewing what resolutions you missed and more about learning what got in your way. I’ve already missed one day of exercising but guess what? I learned that I needed to rest and I used that little reflection moment to get motivated to pick the habit back up the next morning.
At the end of the day, remember too that our lives aren’t shaped by the resolutions we set each year. They’re shaped by the people we’ve been lucky enough to connect with and experiences we’ve been lucky enough to share.
So, here’s to applying the same compassion we apply to our fellow designers and customers to ourselves. Happy 2023.
Are you setting resolutions this year or trying something new? Share your thoughts in the comments.
