I Resolve to do…Something

We all know the story. The evening of December 31st, you set an ambitious goal for the new year. Perhaps you're a runner, and you want to improve your mile time. Maybe you’d like to maintain an ‘A’ in your hardest class. After declaring your intention for the new year, you ring in January first and go to bed, ready to start fresh.

And before you know it it’s February. Looking back to the beginning of 2024, have you kept up with your resolution? Have you been drinking your water and being nice to your mom? It won't come as a surprise if many of you haven’t, in fact the Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University found that only around 9% of Americans actually complete their New Year’s resolution. If January came and went without any progress towards your 2024 goals, you’re certainly not alone.

For as long as I can remember, I have had a New Year’s resolution. Some years it was about eating more fruits and vegetables, often I’ve set a goal to write more. But this year, I didn’t make a New Year’s resolution. I felt frustrated, I think, by my previous lack of progress. I thought that if resolutions don’t ‘work’, maybe we should give them up altogether.

But the tradition isn’t going away any time soon, in part because of its history. The first recorded practice of making New Year’s resolutions was in Mesopotamia, nearly 4,000 years ago. Ancient Babylonians would vow during the spring equinox to be better in the upcoming year. These promises often included returning borrowed farm equipment, which I have to believe is more achievable than many of our modern goals.

In ancient Rome, men would swear to Janus - a two-faced god that looked simultaneously into the future and backwards toward the past - that they would be well behaved until the following January. Medieval knights would proclaim their oath to chivalry in the New Year by vowing to a peacock. If I had a peacock present at all of my goal-setting sessions, I might be more willing to make resolutions.

The concept of a New Year’s resolution is ingrained in our past, and as such likely won’t be going away for some time. There’s something special about that, really. A tradition that spans oceans and millenia is something that you could do with a piece of printer paper and a ballpoint pen in your living room. So if New Year’s resolutions are here to stay, what can we do to make the most of them?

The first thing to do is develop your intention into a SMART goal (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-oriented). A simple shift in wording may be the key to unlocking your productivity. For example: Getting straight A’s may be your New Year’s resolution. While this is a valiant intention, it’s nebulous and vague, with no mention of how or when you plan to achieve it. In a SMART format, your goal might look something more like this:

“I will turn in all my homework on time this semester. Each week, I will write a list of schoolwork I need to complete, and put a check next to the items I completed on time.”

This resolution has a specific goal (turning in your homework), and a way to measure it (checking off items). It’s attainable (while becoming the perfect student overnight may be pretty difficult, building the foundation for time management can be done in small increments), and it's relevant to an important part of your life. Lastly, it is time-oriented. It’s perfectly alright if your goal doesn’t have a deadline, but it's important to set aside time to check in with yourself (such as “each week”).

The second important aspect of setting successful New Year’s resolutions is creating some “if-then” situations, a technique developed by psychologists Peter Gollwitzer and Anja Achtziger. Psychology Today says that goal setting appeals to the logical part of your brain, the part that already knows that long-term progress is important. The impulsive part of your brain - the area that allows us to act on instinct and impulse - is the section that doesn’t quite understand. In order to trick your brain into instinctively working towards your New Year’s resolution, you need to speak to it using “if-then” sentences. Using our previous example, “if a teacher assigns a piece of homework, then I will write down the due date.” This allows the impulsive part of your brain to blunder into a room, see something it recognizes, and impulsively respond to it with an action that is purpose-made to progress your goals.

So if your New Year’s resolution isn’t working out the way you had hoped, or you're like me and decided not to set one at all, it may be time to rethink. Many people around the world treat New Years as a time to start fresh, but who's to say that we can’t start fresh in February, too? After all, resolutions are never unachievable, as long as you know how to create them.