Make Plans, Not Resolutions, this New Year

New Year’s Resolutions Don’t Work

After six months, about 80% of people have given up on their New Year’s Resolutions (https://www.forbes.com/health/mind/new-years-resolutions-statistics/). Most of us would be very happy if we lasted half a year with our resolutions intact. We can barely make it through January.

Whether a person completes their resolutions or quits after a week depends on the person and their personality. Certain people are more self-driven or goal-oriented, and they are the ones in the survey going the whole year. But these are the people who make goals and go after them throughout the year. They are not waiting for New Year’s Day to go after what they want to go after. They use New Year’s as a day to make more goals that they want to achieve.

Most people are not built this way. For some of us, the necessities of life, work, and family pull us off-track. For others, we get distracted, and we derail ourselves not with necessities but with everything else vying for our attention.

Whatever the reason, it results in us quitting on our resolutions. Even worse, it can discourage us from even trying to go after our goals throughout the year. But most of the time, when we make our resolutions, we have already set ourselves up to fail.

Vague Resolutions

The absolute worst resolutions are the ill-defined and nebulous ones. We make these resolutions when we don’t know what we want our resolutions to be.

I want to eat healthier this year.

This year, I am going to read more.

I am going to be more present.

These are bad because there is no way to know whether they have been achieved. And then there are some with hazy terms that might mean something different to every person, let alone not be able to be measured. These resolutions are quickly forgotten and thrown by the wayside of our busy lives. We might only remember them next New Year’s Eve when we are thinking of whether or not we did our resolutions from last year. And even then, we probably will not remember exactly what our resolutions were.

Some of these types of resolutions can be modified to a more reasonable kind of resolution by answering some simple questions.

Which books are you going to read this year? How many?

How are you going to eat healthier?

These clarifying questions can help hammer these into an achievable resolution. But chances are, even with a well-defined resolution, we will fail it.

Unrealistic Expectations

We fail in our resolutions because we set lofty goals beyond our capacity to reach them. We have an image in our head of an ideal scenario that takes no other circumstance into account.

I am going to exercise an hour every day.

I will read through the entire Bible.

I am going to get out of debt.

These are all beautiful resolutions. But if that is all they are, then we are doomed to fail them. Unless we set up ourselves to achieve these and reorganize our lives to prioritize them, we will never be able to carry them through the whole year.

And that is the problem with most resolutions. They sound good, and we would love to say that we achieved them, but we do nothing to structure our lives in a different way to allow us to achieve them. We assume that by force of will, we will accomplish them. Unless we change something in our daily lives, our willpower will fail eventually. Life will get in the way. Our old habits will rear their ugly heads. Other priorities will ultimately take precedence.

Make a Plan

New Year’s resolutions are not a magic solution to fix the areas in our lives that need to be fixed. We need to stop treating them like that and expecting changes to manifest because we want them to. Instead, throughout the year, we should be making new goals and plans on how to achieve them. New Year’s Day is an excellent time to evaluate and make new goals for the new year. But without a plan in place, these resolutions are destined to fail.

If you resolve to exercise an hour a day, then you need to plan how to achieve that. What routines are changing? How are you going to add that to an already busy life? How many chapters must you read in a day if you resolve to read the Bible in a year? How will you know if you are on track to complete it?

Finally, we need to have another plan in place. What happens when we fail? We will get sick, travel, get caught at work late, or be at a family event. Throughout the year, things will prevent us from following the new routine and keeping up with our resolutions. Do we fold when that happens? Or do we have a plan to make up for the lost time? When we know that we are traveling, do we prepare ahead of time to stay on track?

New Year’s Day is past, but the new year is just beginning. If you have not made any New Year’s resolutions, there is still time to do it. And if you have, have you already given up on them? I hope not. But don’t worry about it. Instead, restructure your schedule and find a way to succeed. What routines need to change for you to succeed? And how can you sustainably incorporate these changes into your life?

Happy New Year, and may we all draw closer to God in 2024.