‘Tis the season to start fresh, to set resolutions and begin powering through them, to shake off the winter blues, and work toward a goal. There are 365 days to push forward and see if we can make a change and make the year something special. There’s a feeling that we can begin anew or actually succeed this time or tackle those “someday” goals, and now’s the time to really shove off into a new adventure.
Right?
Then why is it that so many resolutions are abandoned by February and dusted off again in the dreary winter days of late December as we once again examine those goals with bleary eyes, glazed over by the treats and sweets we’ve devoured? And why does it feel like resolutions are just another opportunity for failure?
For that matter, why do we even bother trying again when we have a history of mixed success and frustrating failures?
I’m no New Year’s resolution guru. I’m not here to give you the secret to success with resolutions. I’m not going to give you a ten step plan to hit your goals this year. I am going to tell you a few things that have helped me in recent years to attain some of those elusive goals I like to set for myself. Maybe this will work for you, and maybe it won’t, but my hope is it gives you some ideas to adapt to your own situation that can help you.
My biggest secret to New Year’s resolutions?
I don’t call them resolutions anymore. It’s more of a mindset shift, I suppose, but every year that I set resolutions, I’d wind up looking back in disappointment — sometimes as early as February of that same year! — and tell myself I’d failed once again.
In recent years, I started reframing these as simple annual goals. And I’ve allowed myself to change them from annual goals to renewable goals. So each year I can look back, assess, and decide if I bring the goal forward, change it somehow, or ditch it for the coming year. There are a few goals I keep every year, whether I succeed or fail, and framing them this way has helped me to push through my motivational slumps and at least get farther each year.
One example is a writing goal I keep. As a writer, I want to produce good content regularly, but having a strict daily word count goal doesn’t work for me. Instead, I’ve framed this goal as an average word count per day, and whether I write that day or not, I track my words written to see if I hit an overall average for the year. This really helped me in 2024 as it was my most prolific year yet! As a bonus, I don’t limit my tracking to just one kind of writing but include multiple categories so I can track across types of writing, and it really has helped me over the past year to increase my writing.
A second thing I do to help achieve goals is find a way to track them. I mentioned above that I track my word counts, and the thing that has helped exponentially with that is a spreadsheet I designed specifically for this tracking. Now, the big thing about tracking goals is your goals have to be made to track. We’ve all seen the acronyms for setting goals and making them trackable like SMART, and they’re helpful for setting reasonable goals. I won’t go into details on that as you can find enough articles to build a book on the subject of setting attainable goals. I just want to tackle the tracking part of goals here.
You might not like spreadsheets or have no idea how to use them, and that’s perfectly fine. I would just encourage you to find a tool for tracking your specific goals whether it’s an app, a notebook you’ve set up for this purpose, or some kind of graph you fill in with each task you tackle. Different things work for different people, and sometimes it takes a little while to decide what works best for you. I would encourage you to try your hand at a few tracking options to see which ones motivate you best.
And now, let’s talk about a third thing I do to motivate myself. I try not to set daily goals or anything that requires me to tick off a chart on a daily basis because I find it difficult to stick to goals like that. My goals are meant to be averaged out rather than strictly followed, and that helps me hit them better. It also allows me to take breaks. Strict goals can be brittle because they’re so easy to miss due to illness or vacations. Giving myself a project based on averages helps me to feel less stressed about completing it.
I tend to lose motivation during different parts of the year, so making my goals more loose and based on averages has generally helped this busy wife and mom to tackle personal projects throughout the year.
