New Year's Resolutions, or Alternatives

Most of productivity experts seem to have little enthusiasm for New Year’s Resolutions. In large part that’s because they are often just wishes (“I want to loose some weight”) and not really goals. To be an effective goal, there should be a clear description of what success is (“I will loose 20 pounds by June 1st”), and a plan for how to get there (“Starting today I will eat 3 healthy meals a day, avoid all other snacks, and I will avoid completely the following foods and drinks …..”).

Some people suggest picking your most important single goal for the year and just focusing on that to maximize the chances of success. A variation on this that works well with setting new habits is to set a single goal of establishing a new habit each month and focus on that. If you’re successful you’ll set 12 new good habits in a year, which is actually quite an accomplishment.

So after giving this a fair amount of though over the holidays, here’s what I would like to publicly declare. After completing several exercises to examine my strengths and interests, my single big goal for the year is to:

Use my insights and leadership abilities to inform people and inspire them to promote a cooperative, sustainable and peaceful society.

That high level description is too general to be an effective goal, so I’m developing a description of what being successful would look like and a plan to get there.

In terms of a monthly habit I’d like to establish, I came up with the following cluster of related habits for January:

Establish a habit of being better organized, uncluttered, and focused on my important goals. This includes:

• Write current life goals on a wallet sized card. Every project must follow from these.
  
• Unclutter: nothing is to be stored on horizontal surfaces - desk, table tops, floors. Regularly discard unused items.
  
• Email inbox: reduce to less than one screen every evening. When a response is called for, do so within 24 hours.
  
• Web browser: shut down every evening (i.e. no long list of unread articles in tabs)
  
• Simplify activities by applying the 80/20 rule - focus on that 20% of work that produces most of the benefits and start eliminating the rest.
  
• Awake at 5am for daily reflection and planning of the day’s activities. Focus on the most important thing I can accomplish that day to achieve my long term goals.
  
• Regular weekly / monthly / yearly review of goals, projects, progress, plans

Practices specific to work:

• Write current work goals on a wallet sized card. Every project must follow from these.
  
• Keep track of time spent at work to see how well I'm focusing on the important projects.
  
• No personal email or web reading until 4 hours of work is accomplished, then only 30 minutes until work day is done (at least 8 hours).

That’s quite a challenge for establishing new habits in one month, but if successful it could have a big impact on my daily life.