At LMM we prefer the word “goals” to “resolution.” Resolution has almost come to mean failure in three weeks time. We think framing our resolutions as goals will help us reach them. Sometimes you just have to trick your brain!

Why January 1?

You can see the appeal. Everyone likes a clean slate and the slate is never cleaner than it is on January 1. But what if you woke up with a hangover and despite resolving to eat more healthfully, you order breakfast from McDonald’s? Are you going to wait 364 days to try again? Of course not. You don’t have to wait for a certain day to change a habit.

Year End Review

Rather than making the same old tired resolutions, which at a certain point become traditions, look back at the year that just passed. What would you have liked to do better? What did you not manage to get to at all that you still want to pursue? If you did achieve some goals, what helped you to do so?

By looking back at this things, we can better craft goals for the new year and put systems in place to help us reach them.

Day, Week, Month

If the goals are too vague, “save money,” lose weight,” they are hard to track and hard to work towards. Each day, week, and month should have things to do in order to reach the end goal.

If you want to save money, how much money? If you want to save $1000 to start an emergency fund, you can have a daily goal of not buying coffee on your way to work. You can have a weekly goal of bringing lunch from home just three of five days a week (because you want some wiggle room or you’ll get sick of it and give up). You can have a monthly goal of cutting your grocery bill by 20%.

Any goal you set for yourself should have a timeline and a deadline. Marking off time in smaller chunks like day, week, and month helps you to move forward and track your progress. If you get to the end of the day, week, or month, and haven’t achieved what you set out to, you can reassess before much larger chunks of time have passed so you’re not content with giving up and waiting for that clean slate of January 1 to come around again.

Priority(ies)

Priority: “Something that is more important than other things and that needs to be done or dealt with first.”

That definition makes perfect sense. A priority is the most important thing. So how can you have more than one? You can’t but somehow, we all do. And that’s why so many of us fail to achieve our priority because we spread our focus across multiple priorities.

This year make it a goal to do almost nothing. But do a small number of things that matter. Those two statements might seem contradictory, but not as contradictory as having more than one priority.

Some Goals Can Be Fun!

Not all of your goals have to be a slog. Saving money and losing weight, while wonderful things to do that will reward you in many ways for many years, are not really very fun things to do.

So pick at least one goal that is fun to do. For Thomas, it was to have more fun after work. A lot of us can probably relate to this. You come home from work and make dinner, tidy up, pay bills, watch TV. Except for making dinner, for some of us at least, none of those things are fun.

So Thomas signed up and paid for, an ice skating class. A goal like this can kill a few birds; the original of doing more fun stuff after work, because another friend has signed up, Thomas gets to spend more time socializing, and skating is good exercise, although I know he was already doing pretty well in that area. If you can find a way to wrap up a few goals into one, you’ll get more done in less time.

No Is A Complete Sentence