The Alternative to New Year’s Resolutions

Around the holidays, one of the most common questions you hear thrown around is: “what’s your New Year’s resolution?”

For some reason, whenever I hear the responses, I oftentimes have a hard time believing that they will come true. Not because I don’t admire the fact that people resolve to improve themselves, but rather because the resolutions tend to be very vague (what does “become healthier” even mean) and typically lack an actual plan for making them happen.

Recently, I have stumbled across a concept of an Annual Review. Essentially, it’s a document that you put together over the course of a few days and the purpose of it is to deliberately plan for what you want your next year to look like. It starts off by looking at what went well this year, where you failed, what lessons you learned and what you are grateful for. This serves as a foundation to creating a plan for the next year of what you want to accomplish and improve.

Instead of just creating 1–3 “generic” resolutions for the year ahead, you approach this methodically by looking at all areas of life that are important to you. There can be as many or as few as you want — as long as they are things that you want to improve in some way. For me, they are (in no particular order):

Business & Work
Adventure & Travel
Health
Family & Friends
Learning
Helping Others
Legacy
Financial (Earnings)
Leadership

Once you have the categories defined, the second step is to come up with several goals to go within each “bucket”. It’s important to be specific, so that you know exactly what you expect of yourself and whether you actually reach the goal. “Becoming healthier” is too vague to be useful; while “exercise 5 times per week by March” is something that you can actually hold yourself accountable against.

For each goal, you then create a plan of action and a deadline. Figure out what are the steps that you need to take in order to make it happen and when. They don’t have to go into extreme detail, but you should at least outline the first few steps right away. I also found it really helpful to create a timeline of the year and map out all of the actions and goals against it.

As somebody once said: “you can generally do everything that you want to do, just not at the same time.” — this makes it easier to see how the goals fit against each other and anticipate whether you’ll have time for it. When I did it for 2011, I actually had to remove a few goals due to scheduling issues or because I realized that it would be simply to overwhelming.

Finally, once you’re done setting up the goals and objectives, you want to look at each category and figure out what the theme is or, as I call it, “What’s the Point?” What is it that you will accomplish by fulfilling these goals and why is it important? This exercise helps to figure out the big picture and ensure that your goals are aligned with it. For many people, the “What’s the Point?” step will come first and the goals will follow after, but for me, it works the other way around.

The Next Step

When you complete the document, you’ll have a roadmap for the year ahead. Most importantly, if you do it right, it will contain 30–50 goals that are truly important and meaningful to you. It’s incredibly useful to have that laid out in front of you throughout the year.

However, it’s only the beginning. The next step is to actually track yourself against these goals. That consists of two components:

The first one is a monthly plan that you should put together in the beginning of each month. For me, as January rolled around, I realized that there are 20+ different things I need to do this month to move forward with the goals and unless I plan to incorporate them into my routine, I can easily drop the ball. So, I recommend going through your goals in the beginning of each month and looking at what needs to be done that month and moving that into a separate To-Do list.

The second component is the Quarterly Review. Your chances of actually completing most of your set objectives by the end of the year is much higher if you evaluate yourself against your goals on a regular basis. As the year goes by, it’s helpful to setup a time every 3 months to go over your progress and see how you’re doing.

It’s important to note that completing all of the goals is not necessarily realistic because they can become outdated or irrelevant. Plus, if you do complete them all, it’s possible that they were simply set too low. In my opinion, if you’re able to do about 75–80% of them, then you’re doing quite well.

Final Thoughts

I turned 25 recently and, on that birthday, there was a flashback to celebrating the 21st birthday a few years ago. It was fascinating to realize that 4 years have gone by so quickly and a reminder that the next 4 will go by as well.

I firmly believe that we need to live our lives deliberately or the years will get away from us and we’ll just be left with things that we’ve wanted to accomplish, but “just never had enough time” for. I also believe that we tend to overestimate the amount of things we can do in a day, yet underestimate what we can accomplish in a year. When you think about what you want to do over the year and put down concrete objectives and steps, it has a way of gaining a form and becoming a reality.

I hope that you will go ahead and try the exercise for yourself.

In the meantime, if you want to see my 2011 Annual Review & Plan, you can view it here.

Credit: I’ve gotten the idea and guidance for the Annual Review from the blog, Art of Non-Conformity. I’ve made some changes to it and customized to fit my own needs, but the credit for the idea certainly goes to the original author, Chris Guillebaeu.

Originally published at www.quarterlifemusings.com on January 8, 2011.