New year resolutions can be a useful & necessary first step
I see a lot of dislike towards new year resolutions. There is a assumption that new year resolutions is bad and ineffective. Atleast some people think new year resolutions as a finalised plan. It is not. It is just a rough script for how you want your new year to go. You need to be working on it everyday. Trim it down or expand as necessary. You don’t have to hit it all. In fact, most people won’t hit it all. And that is fine. It is definitely better to start your year with a script than go unscripted and blind. Especially for people who didn’t have a script until one. New year resolutions can also be a first step towards setting up your own productivity system. A productivity system which you never had.
But but… if they were serious about it they wouldn’t wait till new year you might say. Yeah, sure! New year resolutions are not for people who already have their stuff together. Or for people who have a productivity system already. It is for people who don’t have it figured out or for people who don’t have a productivity system. It is for people who go unscripted all year.
New year resolutions are not any different from how people find excuses to procrastinate on something either. New year for many is just an excuse to start fresh and do something better. Especially when they have had a bad year. Same reason why you move to a better company to work after working at a horrible workplace. The new company gives you hope and a fresh beginning. We also do this for major birthdays like when you reach 30 or 40. Will Smith did some crazy stuff at his 50th birthday. Like all of this, new year is just a new beginning for many. The problem is that many don’t stick with it. For those who do, it will have positive effects on their life.
As someone who started off the productivity push with new year resolutions, here is my story…
It was the last week of 2016. I was working on my 2017 new year resolutions like every other year. I wrote all the goals – my new year resolutions I have for work was in a github ticket. It was public to other colleagues as well. This was encouraged by my manager at the time. It was the best thing I have done until then. Definitely scary to go public with my goals. But it was nice to have them somewhere.
A couple of months passed and like the majority I started falling behind my resolutions. It was still public and my to-do lists remained majoritively unchecked. And I would see some of my colleagues updating their yearly goals and I was in the majority who didn’t. My new year resolutions became untouched all through Q1 2016 in case I remember correctly. I realised only a few people from the office were updating it regularly.
It was the peer pressure that got to me eventually. I started working on my resolutions/goals more often. But I realised it was hard to remind myself about my goals. It was never in my focus point. To tackle this I set my browser to open the github ticket every time I launched the browser for the day. This means every morning I open my browser, I will see my resolutions. This had a profound effect on me.
Seeing your to-do list regularly will have a positive effect on you. It will put the goals back into your focus point. Soon, I started sticking with the plan regularly. I ended the year by hitting all the main priorities. I didn’t finish all my goals. But I finished all the main goals I wanted to hit. Now I didn’t have to start from scratch anymore. I added new items and copied the backlog to the next year.
New year resolutions that year was the first exposure for me to work on my productivity system. I didn’t want to go unscripted anymore. It was possible only because of the enforcement of the circumstances. But the reality is that it all started only because I wanted to change things during new year with new year resolutions. I could’ve written anything and never updated that ticket. But I tried to stick with it. And it worked out for me.
New year resolutions might not be the most popular and effective way to kick off your life into a new direction. But it definitely one of the most common way people try out every year. It is just another way. Like everything else, just writing things down isn’t enough, you need to work on it.
As a kid I was taught to dream thanks to Dr. Abdul Kalam. New year resolutions can be our dreams. Dreams that we can all work towards to.
”Dream, dream, dream. Dreams transform into thoughts and thoughts result in action.”
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