How are those New Year’s Resolutions going?
Every New Year a lot of us (myself included) rush to write new years resolutions in hopes of making this year our year. Nevertheless, the statistics are pretty grim when it comes to the completion rate of new years resolutions. Initially, I wondered why is this the case? Why do so many people want to have and accomplish their new year’s resolution yet, so few can do it?
The Problem
Based on my own experience and failures people fail to fulfill their New Year’s Resolution due to 3 main reasons:
1. Lack of purpose: People pursue new year’s resolutions because they think that that’s what will make them happy because they heard their friends talking about it or they saw a tv commercial encouraging them to do so. Setting goals that don’t speak to you is a recipe for disaster because without no core motivation for accomplishing your resolution you will give up the moment things get hard.
2. Lack of flexibility: this brings me to my second point, and that is lack of flexibility. I would call this lack of a margin of tolerance. What I mean by that is that people do not account for the fact that they will fall off track with their goals and that that is normal. Once people forget to go the gym or ate a little bit too much, they think that everything is lost and so might as well go back to old habits.
3. Lack of a plan: the third problem that I see is that people lack a plan. More concretely people do not have a system to follow (more on that later). Before I used to set big and ambitious goals like losing twenty pounds or reading one book every month but I failed to create a plan that would connect my day to day to that ambitious goal. If I had made my goal to burn two-hundred extra calories per day or read twenty pages, I would’ve lost twenty pounds (20.85 to be exact), and I would have read twenty-four books of three-hundred pages each!
The Solution
As I thought about ways to increase the likelihood of accomplishing my New Year’s resolution I came across an article about building systems over goals. The author’s basic premise is what I laid out above for people that lack a plan. The idea of setting systems or daily programs that would eventually compound and deliver massive success seemed like a fantastic idea. Furthermore, it seemed doable.
So I gave it a try. I made my annual goals the way I do every year (tweaking them from the previous year to include things that mattered the most to me and reducing superficial things). However, I also included standards to accompany each of my goals. The purpose of this is that each standard would feed into the larger goal. For example, this year I want to read at least twelve books, so one of my standards is to read ten pages every single day. Reading ten pages per day might not seem like a lot, but there are many days in which getting through those ten pages seems impossible because 1000 things come up.
This is where incorporating a margin of tolerance or flexibility into your program comes in very handy because things will inevitably come up. Whether it is a long flight, exams, homework, meetings, etc. something will always come up. Do not fight this. Simply plan accordingly. So in my case what I did is that I kept tabs on the pages that I was reading and if I missed one day I would read 20 pages instead of 10 the next day (this worked particularly well with busy weekdays and slower weekends.
There you go that’s my system. Is it perfect? No. Do I see some progress? Absolutely. Once you see yourself making progress towards your goal it gives you the energy to keep on going. I encourage anyone reading this to give it a try and start building their own system.
