New Year’s Resolutions: Effective or BS?

5 Reasons We Fail at New Year’s Resolutions

Ah, it is that magical time of year when most of us set a new year’s resolution, which we will probably have abandoned by February.

According to data presented on Finder.com, 74 percent of adult Americans plan to make at least one resolution for 2021. That is a 15 percent increase from 2020. Of these resolution setters, though, only 55 percent believe they will actually follow through and achieve their goal.

So the question is, are new year’s resolutions an effective way to make a lasting change, or is the culture surrounding resolutions largely ineffective BS?

The answer: A little bit of both.

Where do we go Wrong With New Year’s Resolutions?

Upon reflecting on my own various failures to keep my resolutions over the years, I discovered some common themes that sabotaged my success. I’m sure you can relate to at least one of them.

• Getting too tied to the calendar
• Giving up after first failure
• Subconsciously afraid of and/or feel unworthy of positive change
• Not having a detailed action plan
• Not having a way to measure progression

The people who stick to their resolutions are not derailed by any of these things. Those of us who don’t achieve our resolutions fail because one or more of these things overwhelm us to the point of giving up. The majority of the 26 percent of people who don’t plan on setting a resolution this year are probably jaded by their past failures.

Issue 1: Getting too tied to the calendar

We are really attached as a society to thinking that the changing of the year is somehow a better time to make changes than any other day. New years, new beginnings, as the saying goes.

In reality, it’s almost a bit of a gambler’s fallacy in that we think the odds of the chance of an outcome change depending on forces that actually have no influence on the outcome.

Imagine a calendar in the form of a giant roulette board. Each day has a square for a total of 365 squares. There is a special 365-space roulette wheel to go along with this board.

This means that when the dealer spins the wheel, there is a 1 and 365 chance of landing on any given day.

Your “chips” are your time and mental energy to influence positive change, of which you have a finite amount.

Is it really the smartest bet to toss all of your chips on January 1st, taking that 1 and 365 chance all the various factors will align and make this the day you actually take a meaningful first step towards positive change?

The point of this analogy is that we often make the mistake of putting way too much stock in getting off to a fast start on January 1st. This is probably the worst day for most people to take the first step towards positive change.

It’s a day off for a lot of people. If you fall in that boat, your mind is in rest and relaxation mode. Not ideal for starting something new. Those who don’t have the day off will struggle with disrupting their workday routine to make time to work on their resolution.

When we don’t get off to the fast start we envisioned on January 1st, we get down on ourselves and often give up before we really began.

Solution: Recognize January 1st for what it is — equal to any other day of the year. You are better off picking a start day that works for you if you want to achieve a positive change.

Spend some time thinking of your yearly rhythm. Do you really have your best mindset and energy level right after the holidays? Maybe the first day of spring is when you are at your best. Whatever day you pick is fine — just set the end date of your plan to be 365 days later.

Spend the month before your start date doing “pre-work”, like developing an action plan and system for measuring progression.

Issue 2: Giving up after the first failure

This issue relates strongly to issue 1. If we put too much stock in getting off to a fast start on January 1st, we set ourselves up for a potent failure right out of the gate.

Plowing through failure helps if you can build up a little momentum with some small successes first. A slow start is better than no start. This is why it is so important to have an action plan that breaks down your resolution into something small that you can do daily.

Sometimes we do get off to a fast start and the first failure comes weeks later. Even though we built up momentum, we often never planned how to deal with our first failure, and from there it is a slippery slope back into our established rituals.

Solution: Make sure your action plan details the actions you will take to bounce back from the days when you will fall short of your daily goals.

Issue 3: Feeling Subconsciously Afraid and/or Unworthy of Change

This one gets me a lot. I’ll feel so motivated for a couple of months, but then I will hit a plateau. Instead of figuring out how to keep climbing, I’ll find ways to rationalize why I really don’t want to get to the top of the mountain and achieve my goal.

Essentially, what my brain is doing is saying it would rather experience the known pain that comes with whatever fault is attached to my resolution than the unknown pain of going through the process of fixing this fault.

Solution: Honestly, if I had a good solution for this, I wouldn’t have this problem.

My plan this time around is to build smaller rewards into my action plan for achieving certain milestones. I’m hoping it will slowly help me accept the new vision of myself as an achievable reality.

Issue 4: Not having a detailed action plan

This issue relates to all of the other issues. I used to set vague resolutions like “become more productive”, but then only have a vague plan for achieving it. Without a plan to refer to, you’re much more likely to feel overwhelmed and give up when you fail or hit a plateau.

Solution: Spend the month before your start date creating a detailed action plan for achieving your objective over the next 365 days. Follow these steps.

1. Write down your goal for the next 365 days.
2. Break down “months” 1–7 into 30-day goals, and “months” 8–12 into 31-day goals
3. For each “month”, write down 3 sets of 10-day goals.
4. The active set of 10-day goals provide your daily tasks.

Your yearly goal is a big-picture goal. If you want to lose weight, a yearly goal would be something like “lose 30 pounds.”

Once you set your goal for the next 365 days, pick a beginning and end date to your year.

Your monthly goals will be in 30 and 31-day increments, but they may not line up with the calendar. If your start date is March 15th, for example, month 1 for you would be March 15th to April 14th.

Monthly goals are more “zoomed in” than a yearly goal. Their purpose is to break down the yearly goal into 12 milestones that each build upon each other.

So your monthly goals for the yearly goal of losing 30 pounds would be to lose 2.5 pounds each month.

The third step is to break each of your months into three 10-day sections. The reason for 10-day increments over 7-day is to try to break our psychological attachment to the days of the week.

These 10-day goals get more specific and start to identify what tasks actually need to get done to make your big-picture goal happen.

Some 10-day goals will be recurring month to month, while others will be one-time goals based on your current needs at the time. The type of 10-day goals you have will vary depending on your big-picture goal.

A recurring 10-day goal could be to go to the gym 8 times and execute your workout plan. A one-time 10-day goal would be creating that workout plan.

Finally, your daily tasks are the things that need to be done to make the larger goal happen. Completing daily tasks is what gives us the sense of progression we need to sustain motivation.

You don’t have to set all of your daily tasks when you create your initial action plan. I like to create a task bank for each 10-day goal with all of the tasks I need to complete, and then make my daily schedule each morning from those tasks.

The final portion of your action plan is to conduct a SWOT analysis on yourself in relation to this goal.

• What strengths of yours can you maximize to set yourself up for success?
• What weaknesses do you have to mitigate to reduce your chance of failure?
• What opportunities are there to make changes to your rituals that will help the positive change become a habit?
• What threats are there to keep you from making those changes?

Issue 5: No way to measure progression

When set a complex yearly goal that requires a lot of moving parts to achieve, you’ll get bogged down if you don’t have a clear progression of the order in which things need to get done and how long each task should take.

It is the feeling of progression that provides the day-to-day motivation to keep working towards positive change. It is much easier to produce this feeling when you have a quantifiable way to measure progression.

Solution: Keep track of how many tasks you complete each day. Look at your stats every week to have an idea which way you are trending.

Final Thoughts

All in all, the concept of setting a yearly goal and then reverse engineering it all the way down to 10-day increments is absolutely proven to be an effective way to achieve goals.

The BS part of the equation is the idea that you have to start that year on January 1st. You can start and restart as many times as you need.

Let’s take some of the pressure off of ourselves in 2021 and work towards positive change in a way that empowers rather than overwhelms.