Episode 86: A System for New Year's Resolutions

Transcript

I guess the more cynical part of me wanted to start this by saying something like, I'm not much of a New Year's resolution guy, but in fact, I think that the new year is a good time to take a minute to reflect.
And specifically reflect on, you know, what happened over the course of the previous year, as well as what you'd kind of like to see the next year bring or look like, or however you want to phrase that.
You know, I don't think there's anything magic about setting a goal specifically to begin on New Year's Day.
For instance, if you know kind of what you want your next year to look like, you know, in early November, then just get started.
You know, there's no reason to wait.
But with that said, I do think sometimes you need a checkpoint.
Sometimes you just need a minute to like a defined moment in time.
Not necessarily to have a clean break, but to reset a little bit and reflect and set up some new goals and ideas.
And in the same way that there's nothing magic about January 1st, there's also no reason not to use January 1st as a way to do that.
Now, in terms of resolutions themselves, you know, I don't know, some of them have become so trite, right?
Like a common one, oh, I'm going to lose weight or I'm going to get in better shape or whatever.
And one of the problems, I think, with using January 1st as this pivotal kind of point in time, it really, it kind of comes at a bad time.
That's part of it.
And then secondly, if you don't, if you give up by February or whatever, all you've done is set your year up to kind of fail, particularly depending on how you have phrased your goals and how flexible your goals are and also just, you know, what your goals are.
You know, I think that the exercise thing gets pointed at so often because it's so easy to define while also being so easy to fail.
It's so easy to say, oh, this year I'm going to, I want to lose weight, which in and of itself is not the best goal, right?
You might want to set some kind of number around that to make it more concrete.
I don't know.
I could argue that either way, I suppose.
You know, there is something to be said for just a broad goal of like want to be healthy or want to lose weight.
But it's also good to sometimes have some, you know, constraints around that.
But regardless, it's very easy to say that.
And then there's a few problems with it, right?
One problem is it's very easy to push it off to say, well, you know, it would only really take me a couple of months to lose 10 pounds.
I'll do it in May, right in time for like beach season or whatever.
And then May becomes June.
June becomes July.
The summer rolls around.
Everyone wants to go out and party and have drinks and whatever.
You have a bunch of barbecues.
You're eating like burgers and drinking beer all summer.
And then all of a sudden, May, June, July has become August, September, November.
And you're right back where you started, right?
That's one way it can fail.
Another way it can fail is like, you know, you go and you try to do the gym thing.
It's like, oh, I'm going to go to the gym.
And then you get to the gym in January and you realize, oh, God, this is terrible.
And you have no habits that you've formed to actually build your life around a gym membership.
And that falls apart very quickly, right?
There's just so many ways that that can fall apart.
With all this being said, I really actually didn't mean to go down some random tirade about exercise.
What I wanted to say was, I have a system that I've been using for a few years to kind of set, both set up my year to come, as well as reflect on the year before.
And it's worked pretty well for me.
It's simple.
I think this is the kind of thing that really anybody could do.
If you have in past years, you know, set some resolutions for yourself or goals for yourself or whatever, and you find that you're, A, routinely not achieving those goals and, B, feeling kind of bad about it, this could help.
So, my solution is fairly low tech, right?
I don't have an app or I don't know if there are apps or there are apps.
I don't know.
I've never explored it.
I don't have an app for this.
I don't sit around journaling like I didn't write it on my wall.
What I've got is in my Dropbox, which is the, Dropbox is what connects all of my computers and devices, right?
That and I suppose iCloud, but Dropbox is where I have like my, really my stuff because it predates my time with Apple devices.
So, I've just had Dropbox forever.
Anyway, I have a file.
Actually, and now it's, I think, four or five files.
Right at the top of my Dropbox, right?
So, it's not sitting inside of some nested folder.
It's right at the top.
And it's called 2025 year in review.
And actually, you know, I had a 2024 and a 2023.
I think I did start doing this back in 22.
But anyway, I have these up now through 2026.
So, I just started my 2026 file.
And anyway, so I'm going to talk about the 2025 one because we just wrapped up that year.
So, I have a file called 2025 year in review.
And the file has three, it's just a text file.
I didn't, this is not a Word document.
It's nothing.
It's a text file.
I don't care about spelling errors.
I don't care about formatting.
It's not even in Markdown.
You know, for those of you who know what Markdown is.
It's just text.
And it has three sections.
The first section is a list of goals that I defined the year before.
And I'll talk about defining those in a second.
But that's the first section.
The second section, I leave a little bit of space and I go to another section.
The second section is a running list of stuff I do during the year that I think is impactful
in some way.
And I'll talk about what I'm, the kind of stuff I list there in a second.
And the third section, and that's this third section, I usually don't, you know, add to
the file until somewhere around November.
But the third section is a running list of goals slash resolutions, quote unquote, that
I want for the next year, right?
So, it's, it's, what am I trying?
So, section one is, what am I trying to do this year?
What are the things I set out to do?
Section two is, what are the things that I have actually done?
And section three is, what do I want to do next year?
And this is a, this is a semi-living document throughout the course of the year.
And what I mean by that is, I write into, I keep section one alone, right?
So, and section one is, is in two places because it's both in, at the top of this year's document,
as well as at the bottom of the previous year's document.
Because the previous year, I created those goals and then I just carry them over into this
year and put them at the top so I know kind of what's going on.
But, but section two, where I just list stuff I do that I think is impactful or important
or achievement kind of stuff or whatever, that goes in section two.
And then section three is where I set up my next year.
So, the kind of stuff that I put in section two.
Now, anything that I try to, if I make progress on goals that I had set the things up in section
one, I note those items here for sure.
But I also list other stuff that I've done because, you know, I'm sure most people fall
into this category, you might set goals A, B, and C for the year, but you might end up
doing X, Y, Z instead.
And those things might have been a real positive impact on your life, whatever those things
you ended up doing instead were, and they should be noted.
And at the end of the year, it shouldn't just be, did I do these things that I set out to
do, it should be, did I do these things I set out to do, and what else did I do?
What else do I think made this year positive, impactful, make me feel accomplished?
What is it that I did during this year, essentially other than sitting around and binging Netflix
and scrolling through my phone, right?
Like other stuff.
So, I'll give you some examples.
And these are a few categories I have under here.
You know, if I made any particular progress towards any, you know, side hustle, business
endeavor, major career stuff, I list that here.
Even if it wasn't part of my goals, I list that here.
So, for instance, one of my goals from one of these prior years was, you know, I wanted
to diversify my income a little bit, have more income sources than just a full-time job.
And over the last year or two, I have picked up sort of my side contracting web development
kind of stuff.
So, that's been, that's something that I have written down.
Because while it's not my full income or anything else, it has supplemented it to some degree.
And it's something that I feel accomplished about.
I also have a section in there of concerts, events, trips, vacations, that sort of stuff.
Because I think that those are things that it's really easy to just never go and do, right?
It's easy to be like, oh, you know, I love concerts, but this one was too expensive and
that one was too far away.
And this was on an inconvenient date and whatever.
Concerts are a part of what me and my family do.
We try to hit a few a year.
And I like to write them down.
Whether it's me and my wife and kids or just me and my wife or whatever.
I just write them down here.
And then other significant events, you know, like, did you do something really interesting
and fun for your birthday?
Did you do something really interesting and fun for someone else's birthday?
Did you go on vacation somewhere that was cool?
These may not sound like quote-unquote accomplishments, but at least for me, in today's world, the
fact that you take time for yourself to go and do something interesting, again, something
that's other than just the same old routine and sitting around and doing the same three
things every day, these things should be noted.
I also have a section in there for books that I read that year.
Because once again, it's really easy to just not read, at least for me.
And so writing down, having a running list of the books I read that year, it's nice to
look back that year and reflect on that and be like, you know what?
I read 10 or 12 books, or I read five books, or you know what?
I read two books, did something.
And I kind of remember, you know, which ones of those did I enjoy?
Which ones of those were impactful?
Those are things to note.
So those are the sorts of things I tend to list in that, what did I do this year section.
It's direct reflections on how I did with my goals.
Like, did I make progress on my goals that I set the year before?
Or what books did I read?
What events did I go to?
What concerts did I go to?
What are the things that I really want, either want to remember or do remember readily?
And then is there stuff that I've done with, you know, my career, sometimes like more personal
accomplishment, progression kind of stuff?
Was there a thing or two that I did with my kids that I really want to make note that
it's almost a running list of things that would have been super easy to not do, but I decided
to do them instead.
And in some ways, you could think about it that way.
And then finally, section three, you know, I kind of, that's, I usually don't start putting
that together until like October, November.
It's usually that, like, like that last quarter of the year where I start looking at this document
and saying, ooh, like, how did I do that?
How, how does it look like I'm doing?
Because by, by October, November, you're, you know, you look at some of these goals and
if you, if you had a goal on there that was going to take you all year and now it's
October and you haven't started it yet, that one might not be getting done this year.
Right.
So then you start writing, I start writing up my goals for the next year and I don't
have a huge list of them, five items ish plus or minus, right?
What are the, and they don't have to all be super significant giant things.
It can just be something small that you really want to do, or it could be more long, long
running.
I'll give you an example.
This year, you know, I've long been a, a musician kind of on and off through my life.
I play several instruments, guitar being kind of the primary one among them.
And in recent years, I've really kind of slipped out of it.
Like I just, I don't play much and I haven't played with people in a long time.
And what I really loved about music was playing with people.
So I have a goal this year to find a group of people to play music with.
There's an embedded goal in there of, I need to start playing music again, right?
Cause I'm super rusty.
I couldn't just easily jump in with the group and really do much of anything.
So I want to do that for, I need to do that first.
And then I want to try to find some people.
And that's a big goal for me this year.
And come October, November, I'm going to look back at that and it will be pretty clear.
Like, did I do these things?
Cause there's both a broad goal in there of like, quote unquote, start playing music,
which is again, which is very broad.
And it's something very specific in there too, of with the intention of playing with people.
And, and that I think is a good structure for a goal where there is a kind of yes, no binary.
Did you do it or not?
While also having something broader under the hood.
Cause when you look back and reflect on that, that could go a few ways, right?
At the end of the year, I could say to myself, you know what?
I didn't find a group of people, but maybe I tried and it just didn't shake out.
But you know what?
I've been playing music all year and that's pretty good for this goal.
You might not hit it a hundred percent, but if you have kind of some specific elements
to a goal and some broader elements to the goal, you can reflect on the whole thing
and get a sense of like, did I progress here at all?
And I have some other ones as well.
Now, the way I use this file, this text file document through the year, I don't sit and
have this up every day.
This is not a thing that anyone should be stressing about or worried about once every
few months.
I might only check in on this once every three or four months and just look at it and I'll
write down a few things I've done, right?
And there's certain checkpoints too.
Like, again, like I mentioned, there's some things embedded in here that are useful.
When I finish a book, because reading is a section in here, it prompts me to go check
this file, right?
Because I finish a book, I want to write it down in my file, and then I'll also take a
few minutes and look at the rest of the file.
And it's a good checkpoint to think, ooh, am I making progress towards the things that
I wanted to do?
Do I remember what the goals I set were?
Same thing with concerts.
Like, I'll go to a concert and then I'll think, you know, week two later, like, oh,
I want to write down that I went to that concert in my file.
Go back to the file, gives me the same kind of opportunity, look through it, blah, blah,
blah.
And then as I get closer to the end of the year, particularly into December, that's when
I start looking at this file more regularly.
Like, I have it up and just sort of up running idle on my computer.
It's just kind of there in the background because it's a good time then to reflect and
think to yourself, how did I do with these goals?
And that's when I go up into that first section where I have the year's goals listed and I
start bullet pointing, writing down in that right there underneath the items, did I do
this or not?
Did I accomplish anything here?
Did I do anything resembling this this year?
And that's also when I start my file for the next year.
So I'll create a new file.
It'll be called, you know, this year it was 2026, year in review.
Any goals that I've established for myself, I carry them over right around New Year's and
I start my new file and I start my new running list of like things that I'm happy I did this
year.
A lot of this can be boiled down to that is you make a few called shots.
You write down stuff that you're happy you did that year that were out of the ordinary
from your routine.
And then you set up some called shots for the next year.
And I found this to just be a very effective method of this.
The other piece to this, again, I, there are some intentional pieces in here.
Like I said, I put this in my Dropbox and I'm often in my Dropbox.
The name of the file is also very intentional.
It's called 2025 year in review, which means it starts with a number, which means that when
my Dropbox is sorted by name, which it usually is like the name of the file, it's toward the
top of the list.
It's sitting right there.
So, it's not that I like sit around and make it a habit to check this all the time, but I have enough
built-in mechanisms that I happenstantially check it throughout the course of the year without it ever
feeling like a burden.
It's named a number and with a number.
So, it's the top of my list.
I think to do it after I read a book.
I think to do it after I go to a concert.
Just some of these checkpoint items that's like, oh, you know, I remember this file.
I set this up a while ago.
Let me hop in here and update a couple things and read through it.
So, it's minimal effort, but it kind of keeps me on track with a few things.
It keeps me on track with remembering what I set out to do, number one.
And number two, it keeps me on track with just keeping a running list of things that have kind
of made me happy that year.
At the end of the day, those are great things to reflect on when the next year rolls around
without being a high pressure, high intensity, I must lose 10 pounds in March thing that's
just set up to fail.
This is a way to catalog both the things you have set out to do, like did I do them or not,
but also all of the other things that you do along the way that are also important, even
if they weren't your initial called shots.
So, you know, if you're looking for some kind of really simple system and you're not
really sure, you know, how to make a resolution or a new year's thing kind of work, but you're
feeling that itch, that itch of like, you know, I'd like to do some things differently
this next year.
Give it a shot.
It's worked really well for me.
It's simple.
And I've been keeping up with it for four or five years now.
And it's just a great way to kind of easily catalog things without a lot of, you know,
crazy effort.
Just to keep an eye on what, what your year really looks like and what you really want
to do next.
Next.