Already Dropped Your New Year’s Resolution? We’re Here to Help You Pick it Back Up
New Year’s resolutions can be difficult to maintain, but we have some tips that will keep you going
Make sure your goals are measurable, have some friends help you out, and get some tools to help you keep to your New Year’s resolutions.
As the old saying goes, hindsight is 20/19. Now that we’re a few weeks into the New Year, it felt like it was the right time to do a bit of a check in to see how things are going.
There’s a chance that by this time in January, you’ve already faltered on one, two, or all of your New Year’s resolutions. It happens this way every year — there’s a huge push toward self improvement, fueled by the rose colored glasses leftover from the holiday season. But almost inevitably these resolutions fall to the wayside once rubber meets the road. It happens so often that making New Year’s resolutions can feel like a joke nowadays. However, we at Edison Mail haven’t lost all hope. We know that resolutions can lead to real change if you work at them, it’s just that sometimes you just need some help to get them to work. So here’s a list of 5 ways you can make 2020 the year you stick to your goals.
1. Don’t Let Perfectionism Beat You Up
Maybe your New Year’s goal was to become a vegan, and then on January 10 you find yourself absentmindedly munching on some bacon. Or maybe you wanted to spend less time on your phone, but find yourself up at 1am scrolling through your Facebook timeline for the umpteenth time. Many people at this point find themselves becoming their harshest critic. They become their own bully, as the voice in their head berates them for falling short of their goals.
But doing this doesn’t help you reach your goals — all that this kind of negative self-talk does is lead to falling feelings of self-worth. After all, would you talk to your close friend this way for making a mistake? The likely answer is no. It’s important to remember as you begin working toward a goal — after all a New Year’s resolution is a goal — you’ll mess up. Progress is nonlinear, and while it’s important to continue towards your goal, it’s also important to remember that you will mess up from time to time.
To achieve your goals, you have to remember to forgive yourself for not being perfect.
2. Make Sure Your Goals are Actionable and Measurable
Matthew Kelly wrote in his book, The Long View, “Most people overestimate what they can do in a day, and underestimate what they can do in a month. We overestimate what we can do in a year, and underestimate what we can accomplish in a decade.” Before the start of the year, we write down all these goals of what we want to accomplish before the end of it. “Lose weight, exercise more regularly, cook more often, get more organized” are some of the classic resolutions people make for themselves. The thing is, the easier a resolution is to make, the easier it is to forget. Not to bring up another platitude, but they say that “A goal without a plan is just a dream,” and nowhere is this truer than with New Year’s resolutions.
Instead of giving yourself a vague of being “more organized” or “in better shape”, change your goal to be something that can be measured, something more like “have fewer than 10 unread emails,” or “be able to do a pull-up.”
3. It’s Not Willpower, It’s Habit
We all know those types of people who wake up early, go on a run, and cook themselves a healthy breakfast — all before 7:30am. While it could be easy to say that people who are able to do that just have incredible willpower, there’s more to it than that — it’s a matter of habit. In her book, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick, Wendy Wood discusses that the central force for eliminating bad habits is “‘friction’: if we can make bad habits more inconvenient, then inertia can carry us in the direction of virtue, without ever requiring us to be strong.”
A study of such people in Germany showed that many of those people who seem to be extremely disciplined aren’t necessarily better at resisting temptation, they’ve simply restructured their environment “in ways that sustain good behaviors.” This may mean not purchasing unhealthy snacks to begin with, or putting unhealthy snacks in an inconvenient place so they’re more difficult for you to grab at any moment.
4. Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for Help
It can be hard to keep yourself accountable and to continuously be your own support system. That’s why online groups and forums are so popular. Strava is a popular app for runners and cyclers for this exact reason. There are also different online communities especially on Reddit or Facebook that are only a quick search away. For those who would rather have something in real life, it’s always a great idea to talk to friends or family about your goals and ask them to help you stay on track.
5. Get Some Tools to Help You Along
Most accomplished mountaineers can’t climb the highest peaks without oxygen packs. In the same way, many people can find it difficult to accomplish their big goals without tools to help them along the way. Having a hard time staying on task? Maybe you need to block out certain websites with the StayFocused extension, or just need a giant timer on your desk. Always have too much email? Maybe try out Edison Mail and its ability to help you One-Tap Unsubscribe and easily mass delete mail.
Putting these tips into action, let’s say your resolution was to save more money. First you have to define it. How much money do you want to save? For hypothetical purposes, let’s say that by the end of the year you want to save 30% of your monthly income. The first step would be to take a look at your spending habits over the last few months. Where is your money going? Does it need to go there? Then you should find a budgeting style that works best for you, whether that’s writing down every purchase you make or using a mobile app. Then design your life in a way that makes it easier to stick to this goal. Are you always online shopping? Use Edison Mail to mass unsubscribe from shopping newsletters that keep you coming back for more. Join subreddits like r/personalfinance or tell your friends about your goal so they can help you stay on track.
Sticking with New Year’s resolutions can and often is difficult, but with these tips, it’s anything but impossible.
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