Revamping New Year's Resolutions

It is that time of year again when families gather around with A3 blocks, felt tips, and an earnest desire to get things done. This is usually briefly preceded by fervent rifling through papers typically coated in a layer of dust one year thick and a flurry to destroy the evidence of previous commitments. Glancing down last year's list only to be berated by your younger ghost is bad enough...

My younger ghosts tend to tell a disgruntled tale and I'd wager most of yours do, too. How many of last year's goals did you fulfil? "But COVID..." Yes? What of the year before? And the year before that? A survey conducted by CouponCabin in 2012 revealed that 80% of all gym-goers inspired by a New Year's Resolution had quit within 5 months. And that pattern no doubt finds its analogues in just about every field of resolution-making available.

Learning a new language? You're probably on a particular green owl's hit list.

Saving up long-term? Your Amazon order history probably has something to say.

And I am no better than you. For every twenty goals, I probably fulfilled one - and that one was mostly out of my control!

All in all, the picture is pretty bleak and, given the train wreck that the past two years have been, I have tempered my enthusiasm for this year's resolutions. Rather, I've given New Year's resolutions a closer look to figure out what has been going so wrong.

When I began it was little more than a family activity in early January. Religiously, with jotters and markers, I would furiously scribble down things that "felt right". "I want to be a better person." "I want to be happier/more gracious/more grateful..." And let's be real - it never worked. What did that even mean? How did I know I was happier today than yesterday?

And so in came a more rigorous goal-making approach. An approach that coincided with some kind of maturity (and a bunch of classes in Life Skills). One that we are all no doubt familiar with by now: SMART goals. The logic is simple: to combat the frailty and fickleness of the mind, goals need to be built within a framework. Something that would allow us to contextualise the goal within our lives to make them more tangible right from the start. All together then: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound.

But why didn't that work out? For over a decade I was making SMART goals only to be mastered by them.

The story became clearer as I ventured into engineering, IT, tech, and project management.

The study of processes and frameworks within which to work efficiently was something that the tech industry had been doing since the beginning of tech industries. The techniques and practices that keeps innovation charging onwards at such a snappy pace could just as easily be applied to my personal struggle with self improvment.

"But we are not businesses, we are not machines, and quite frankly I do not want to be run like a corporation!" I hear you say. And this is true. Of course none of us wants to exist within a rigid framework of flowcharts and policies and to suggest that anybody could is ridiculous. After all, it takes corporations an army of personnel to ensure their every policy and process is being followed as it should be. Nonetheless, the principles and techniques developed over the decades were developed with its number one adversary in mind: our fickle minds. In every area that a process could fail, we have tried to understand how our minds have allowed us to fail it. So why was I trying to reinvent the wheel with a whole new approach to my personal development when I was spending eight to ten hours a day using a system of techniques that was handily leading me through hundreds of projects at work?

The first thing that project management teaches us is to consider the outcome of a project. In all cases, a project will become part of Business As Usual, or it will be terminated. And if it is going to become part of Business As Usual, it better have done something to make it easier. Where will your project end up? And this is where SMART goals fall over in most places. SMART works nicely for one-offs, and projects that have no continuation. A New Year's Resolution that is a SMART goal will have a defined endpoint but will leave a gaping hole once it is done. Hardly sustainable. We don't have stakeholders that we report to in December with a checklist and progress report on each New Year's Resolution because we, as normal human beings, will drop a project as soon as it is close to completion to pursue newer, fresher ideas. Fickle, aren't we?

So, now we reconsider why we are making New Year's Resolutions. Typically it is because we want to better ourselves. It's a nice, simple, catch-all answer - start the new year with promises to make it better than the last. But what does that mean to you, as an individual making goals? It has something to do with lasting change. It has something to do with achieveing things you never thought you could. It has something to do with being in a different place next year and some sense of accomplishment and fulfilment. Because, much like corporations, humans are in a constant state of change. So, actually, a New Year's Resolution is a promise to change our Business As Usual, our day-to-day lives.

The last time I saw a project spanning multiple years was at the top of a stack of work items. Nobody saw that page again unless some fundamental assumptions going into the project changed. In IT, these huge projects are aptly called "epics" - because that is what they are, colossal undertakings of epic, and frankly demoralising, proportions. "Break it down into chunks." Is what we are told as we make our SMART goals, but I know I typically ignored that advice or found myself at a loss for how small I should break it into. IT, again, has the answer, and that answer is to break the work down into the smallest actionable item possible. I found that as I did this, I began to notice something about how my SMART goals were breaking down.

Take an example: last year I wanted to learn to play the guitar. (Yes, I see you sniggering, and no, I didn't learn anywhere near as much as I wanted.) Using SMART, my goal was to learn ten songs by the end of the year. Ticks all the SMART boxes, doesn't it? But with this one-liner inked onto my page, what did I do? I proceeded to put it off to tomorrow, because learning ten songs on a new instrument is hard. But let's break it down. Right down to the basics. What would I have to do to learn ten songs? I'd need to learn a chord on Monday. I'd need to learn a chord on Tuesday. I'd need to put both of those together on Wednesday... Gosh, when you put it like that: I can pick up my guitar and play one chord and learn it well in a day, can't I? And then the next day, and the next...

... Which then led to the next piece of this puzzle. A piece that industry had already figured out. To get good at something, you need to practice (duh). To get a process working well in the workplace, you need to run through drills and ingrain those behaviours. You need to come back to it every day because five minutes a day is far more valuable when learning a skill than an hour once a week. Now you are building habits. Now you're even taking advantage of the principles of compunding interest because if you make just a 1% improvement today, and a 1% improvement tomorrow, by the end of the year all of that compounding makes you 3778% better than you were at the start of the year. (Yes, I know quantifying % improvement is difficult, but the point is small changes daily, rather than epic one-off efforts.)

So let's come back to those goals that never seem to work out:

"I want to learn to play the guitar." What should I be saying? "I will play five minutes of guitar every day."

"I want to learn a new language." Becomes "I want to speak to my language owl for ten minutes a day."

"I want to do ten pull-ups." Is just "I want to go to the gym for half an hour every day."

And your SMART goal is simply a milestone, because by the time you've achieved it, you've forgotten all about it and are stuck in learning new skills, bettering yourself in a lasting way by building habits that will keep developing you well into the next year and the year after that.

TL;DR: how am I changing my approach to New Year's Resolutions? By making habits, not resolutions.

And if ever you have an off day, let's face it, we all do, don't fret: "if something is worth doing, it's worth doing badly." Have an off day, just don't have a zero day.