As the new year approaches, many of us are planning the year to come. The old New Years Resolution is still a common practice, though at times the stats can seem a bit discouraging. According to one 2017 study, of the 41% of Americans who set new Years Resolution, only 9% felt like they’d successfully kept them.
I definitely know the feeling – but I don’t consider this a reason to despair.
Temporal Landmarks
Temporal landmarks – whether it’s the start of a week, a month, or a year – are effective at motivating us to begin a new behavior. It’s important not to conflate this with our potential for successfully maintaining that behavior – the landmark will help us initiate unrealistic goals too, so we need to choose our goals carefully. That said, even if you are well aware of the frequent fail-rate of New Years Resolutions, why not make use of a considerable temporal landmark to provide you the initial gusto to kick it off? Just make sure you use a few techniques to start it off right, and you’ll increase your chance of success. Let’s go through a few strategies to help:
SMART goals
I’m sure most of you have heard of SMART goals by now – SMART is an acronym for ‘Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound’ – all these factors can prove very important for setting sensible goals. If you don’t have strong criteria for your goals, how would you even know if you achieved them? It’s important to write your goals down, and take a moment while you’re doing it to quickly run through the SMART criteria and make sure your goal makes sense. Let’s take two example resolutions:
- Lose weight.
- Lose 2 pounds a month for 5 months, and then maintain my weight.
#2 is much less ambiguous – when 5 months is over, you will know for sure whether you succeeded or failed. It is not overly ambitious, such as losing 100 pounds in 5 months.
Tracking your Progress
Another important factor of keeping your goals is to track them. One big culprit for failing New Years Resolutions is quite literally forgetting about them. After a few weeks of discipline, life starts to get in the way, and little by little it gets pushed to the wayside until in March you’re left wondering what you even committed to. Obviously the first step is to physically write down your goals, but equally important is arranging some regular check-ins to track your progress and, if needed, adjust your strategy accordingly.
In the weight loss example, the obvious solution is to weigh in consistently. Whether it’s every morning, every Friday, or even once a month, make sure you collect some data and see if what you’re doing is actually working. Tracking calorie consumption is another valuable metric. If the goal isn’t measurable, perhaps you should re-evaluate how you defined it in order to MAKE it measurable. This isn’t always easy, but without metrics, you won’t be able to objectively gauge how you’re doing.
I like to use Notion as my general tracking system, but how you track is matter of preference. I’ve written several articles on my ‘Second Brain’, where I make use of projects to drive my goals. Resolutions are, essentially, projects, a series of steps with a clear criteria for success. Don’t become too obsessed with the time constraint of one year – just because you set your goal in January doesn’t mean it needs to end in December! Some things will be done sooner, some things will take longer – remember, the temporal landmark is simply a good way to get started.
Using Friction
Many habits live or die by how much friction they incur. If you set a goal to get to the gym 3 times a week, the friction involved in getting there will make a considerable difference in your chance of success. If going to the gym means an hour long bike ride in the snow, do you think you’ll have a hard time doing it? Always endeavor to reduce friction for habits you would like to initiate – there’s the classic piece of advice to sleep in your running clothes so you can immediately get out for a morning run. I keep a kettlebell in my office so it’s always within easy reach.
The bright side of friction is it can be used to your benefit to break bad habits. It’s often difficult to just stop a vice through strength of will – if you keep a bottle of whisky on your shelf then drinking it is a low friction activity. If you have to do the aforementioned one hour bike-ride every time you want a drink, don’t you expect you’ll drink less? Hell, at least you’ll get a bike ride out of it. Even little points of friction can prove useful – when I don’t want to be distracted, I turn on a web-blocker that can only be opened by a long and annoying password, which I keep hand-written in a locked drawer. Turning off the web-blocker means unlocking the drawer, fishing out the paper, and onerously typing in the long password. Does it always stop me from wasting my time on Youtube? No, but it certainly undercuts the often mindless habit many of us have to navigate to our website of choice whenever we’re momentarily bored.
Using Rewards (Or Punishments)
Feedback is important to habit-formation. Many toothpaste manufacturers implemented a minty flavor in order to produce a ‘rewarding’ sensation for brushing your teeth – certainly it’s not hard to imagine that a tooth-brushing habit would be much harder to establish if it tasted foul. Because your goals are measurable, it means you can impose rewards or punishment. One common method my friends and I have used for years is a ‘bet’ system where we place financial wagers on keeping our goals – failure meant giving my friend the money, though we’ve since switched to charitable donations to get around the perverse incentive of ‘trading’ failures.
Come up with ways to give yourself feedback – some people are more motivated by rewards, some by punishments. Either way, in the span of you tracking your goals, especially goals that won’t necessarily have immediate feedback, come up with something to keep you on task. A phenomenon known as ‘loss aversion’ contributes to this as well – forgoing a reward or paying a punishment is painful to us. It happens that for most people, avoiding loss is much more motivating than the potential for gain.
Using Social Accountability
The other effective thing that the ‘bet’ system with my friends did was provide social accountability. We can often justify our private failings to ourselves quite easily, but sometimes these failures are more embarrassing or difficult to justify to someone else. If you commit to getting out of bed every day at 7:00, and fail to do so, having to admit it to someone else stings – especially if there’s an associated punishment. Shame can be a powerful motivator, as can camaraderie. My most successful ‘bets’ are always the ones I’m doing with someone else.
If you want to give social accountability a try, we’ve been launching a discord channel called ‘Bettr’ to declare your goals and post your progress. If you want to give it a try, you can find it here.
Control your time horizon
A year is a long time. I think a lot of my New Years Resolutions fail because I get it in my head that I need to set year-long objectives. The truth is that a shorter time-horizon is much easier to maintain, and it also means you can get back on the horse more easily if you fall off. If your goal is not to miss a workout all year, missing one workout ‘fails’ that goal. If your goal is to work out three times a week, you can always calibrate from week to week. A bad week doesn’t ruin your year. Likewise, ‘three workouts a week’ is much easier to track and conceptualize than ‘156 workouts a year’, isn’t it? Remember that we’re quite vulnerable to a phenomenon known as ‘temporal discounting’ – we discount future outcomes, and we often overestimate our ability to do things later. If it’s 156 workouts in a year, you might be able to think you can do that in half a year! … The second half, of course.
Don’t be a perfectionist
I’m a big fan of Voltaire’s quip – ‘The perfect is the enemy of the good.’ Many perfectionists have the tendency not only to set unrealistic goals, but also to despair at not meeting their own exacting standards. Perfectionism is not your friend. Many have a tendency – myself included – to go ‘fuck it’ if they have failed to meet the standard they set out at the onset, and quit. Or they’ll ‘batch’ bad behavior – in for a penny, in for a pound. It’s important to develop the skill of mitigating failures – remember that success and failure is rarely a binary. Remember that study above, where only 9% felt like they’d successfully kept their New Years Resolutions? I wonder how many of them were still better off than if they’d not set any goal at all. If your goal was to quit drinking, and you reduced your drinking by half, that isn’t an abject failure. If your goal is to go to the gym three times a week and you went once, you were still 33% successful. And obviously, if you’ve been pulling three times a week for three months and miss a week because you were sick, that is NOT a reason to stop for the year! Your resolution didn’t fail, and it’s important not to let one failure spiral into indefinite bad behavior.
You’re going to encounter hiccups – even if you set very realistic, achievable goals, you’re not always going to be on your best behavior. Acknowledge this, know when you’re starting to slip, and try to take measures to get yourself back on track.
