New Year's Resolutions: Put Your Imperfections Behind You!

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Fresh starts are real!  This week we will hear a lot of advice about setting the appropriate New Year's resolutions. We'll also hear about how hard it is to actually adhere to our resolutions.   So many of us establish diet or exercise goals this time of year, but by the spring, we find ourselves struggling to stick with our original plans.  Having said that, recent research does suggest that New Year's Day might be a more effective day for setting a bold goal than a "typical" day during the year.   

Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman,  and Jason Riis published a paper three years ago titled, "Put Your Imperfections behind You:Temporal Landmarks Spur Goal Initiation When They Signal New Beginnings."  They studied "temporal landmarks" - i.e. days that “stand in marked contrast to the seemingly unending stream of trivial and ordinary occurrences” in our lives. These landmarks include birthdays, holidays, new beginnings (of a year or semester), and major life events such as a wedding.  These scholars examined whether an event that marked a "new beginning" could be motivating for people to pursue a particular goal.   Dai, Milkman, and Riis found that landmarks that represent new beginnings are useful to us because they enable us to "leave our old selves behind" and to embrace a better version of ourselves.  We can "disassociate" ourselves from our past imperfect selves, in a sense, at these landmark moments.  That motivates us to pursue a new goal, perhaps to eradicate a bad habit.  

In sum, New Year's Day might just be the right time to attempt to pursue a bold new goal regarding your career, personal well-being, or other aspect of your life.  Of course, much work will remain with regard to adhering to that goal.  However, the holiday will certainly be advantageous when it comes to initiating the pursuit of this new goal, much more effective than January 3rd or 4th might be... unless that happens to be your birthday or some other key moment in your life.  

Jimmy Kimmel's Take on New Year's Resolutions

I posted this funny video clip from Jimmy Kimmel last year just a few days into the new year.  It's worth another look!

Rethinking How You Set Your Goals (and form New Year's Resolutions)

Duke's Dorie Clark has some good advice in her HBR blog post regarding goal setting strategies. Clark first cites some interesting research on the ineffectiveness of to-do lists:

Indeed, one indication of this is the pervasive use of to-do lists, which attempt to keep a handle on one’s responsibilities and are, according to one LinkedIn study, used by 63% of professionals. That would be great if we reliably accomplished what we set out to do. But the startup iDoneThis analyzed their users’ data and discovered that 41% of the to-do list tasks users inputted were never accomplished — little wonder in a world where the average professional has 150 tasks to be done at any given time, according to research by psychologist Ray Baumeister and John Tierney.

Clark then argues that individuals should make the same type of shift in planning and goal setting that corporations should make.    She makes the point that corporations need to move away from annual strategic planning rituals toward a shorter planning cycle that allows for nimble adaptation to changing competitive circumstances.  Similarly, Clark advocates moving away from the New Year's Resolutions technique toward a strategy of setting goals and revisiting them several times during the year.  Moreover, she argues for limiting the number of objectives that you establish at any given point in time.  Focus on the bigger goals rather than the lengthy to-do list.  Surely, you do have some routine tasks that you must accomplish.  However, Clark argues that we need to separate the mundane tasks from the bigger goals.  If not, we will always keep pushing aside the big meaningful task and focusing instead on trying to cross of  the minor items on the to-do list... so that we can at least feel some sense of progress on a daunting task list.  Clark summarizes her argument as follows:

The point of goals, of course, isn’t to successfully complete tasks we blindly set ourselves to years ago. Nor is it to maximize our accomplishment of small bore trivialities. Instead, what counts is our ability to master the right kind of big goals — the ones that can change your life, like positioning yourself for a promotion to the C-suite or writing a book or launching an entrepreneurial venture. You can only accomplish those kinds of goals when you’re willing to question assumptions regularly and re-evaluate as necessary, and when you give up the temporary dopamine hit of crossing easy tasks off your to-do list, in favor of making a dent in the handful of major projects that really matter.

What New Year's Resolutions Have You Broken Already?

It's that time of year.  Many people make New Year's Resolutions.  Unfortunately, the majority of Americans break those resolutions, some sooner than others.  Here's Jimmy Kimmel's funny take on this situation.