100 Pounds of Dynamite

I don’t do New Years resolutions, here’s why.

1. Tying an action to an arbitrary start date is a bad idea. If you really want to change something, you should change it as fast as possible. If you pick an arbitrary date to start a change, you’re pretty well sunk as you’ve given yourself an excuse to put it off. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing as soon as you recognize what you need to do.

2. Resolutions aren’t goals. I’ve heard a bunch of resolutions that sound something like this: “my resolution is to lose weight” or “my resolution is to read more”. The problem is that that doesn’t really mean anything. How much weight? How many, or which books? Resolutions like that aren’t goals, they’re just statements. If you really want to make something happen, you need be clear about what exactly you want to accomplish.

3. It’s not about the start, it’s about the end. If you have a goal (instead of just a resolution) you also need a deadline. Anyone can choose a date in the future to start something, but it’s hard to pick a date in the future when you’ll be done with it. This is the key problem with New Years resolutions. Unless you set a date for when you’ll accomplish your goal, you’ll slip easily. It doesn’t matter when you start, so long as you reach the end.

That being said, it’s also possible to ‘resolve’ that a certain year, say 2010 – 2011 will “the year of (whatever).” Maybe 2010 will be the year of getting organized, or losing weight or getting back to your art or whatever. But… that is just a focus area. It won’t mean anything if you don’t set goals within that focus area.