Most people come up with a list of New Year’s resolutions at some point in their lives. Few stick to them. But why?
One reason could be that at the end of the year we just dream too big and are too ambitious about what we want to achieve in the next 365 days.
It’s hard to challenge yourself every day of the year in order to grow.
It’s even harder if you don’t have a plan on how, but only a vague wish to become better.
And I think there lies the first issue. So, this time round I planned 2020 differently. I used the final days of 2019 and January, 1 of 2020 to de-brief my past year and to create a detailed plan (including quarterly milestones) of 2020. I used this Medium post by Jason Shen as a guideline for my annual review process.
The second major reason why most New Year’s resolutions fail in my opinion also has to do with planning as well as with executing – Habits.
When you look into Habits and how to form them you often come across various sources stating that you have to repeat an action between 2-8 weeks to make it a Habit.
Our aim therefore should be not to have all of those dreams and wishes for the new year, but to have a list of Habits that we want to incorporate into our daily lives – for example, writing a daily blog post.
Now, I’m not a strong writer as mentioned in yesterday’s post, and I really wasn’t looking forward to writing today’s post. Partly because nobody will read it, since I’m currently not promoting this blog in any form. But more importantly because I feel that I’m not a strong writer.
However, my hypothesis is that by pushing myself to write every day of January I might just make the writing a Habit and February will be an easier and smoother ride.
It feels like I have some good topic ideas to write about during the day and then once I sit down I have a writer’s block. This leads me to two things I want to work on. Firstly, I want to try and start taking notes (or even write short summaries) about interesting topics during the day and secondly I want to try to write this post during different times during the day to see what time suits me best.
Once I’ve tried a few different ways to do this I should settle for one way.
It turns out that Habits are not only formed best when you repeat an action/task over and over again, but it’s also important to standardise the task and ideally execute it at a similar time every day – just like your morning shower. It’s the exact same process at a similar time every day.