How to Be Someone Who Keeps Their New Year’s Resolutions

For a long time, new year’s resolutions weren’t something I bothered with. My thinking was if you’re going to commit, you’re going to commit, and the time of year at which you make that commitment doesn’t matter in the slightest.

And after a few years of making new year’s resolutions every year… I still feel that way. We make a big fuss about new year’s resolutions, but 96% of all new year’s resolutions fail — 80% of them by February — because the people making the resolutions care more about telling themselves a story than they do achieving their goal.

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be that kind of year for you. You can pick a resolution and be one of the rare people that stick to it, changing their life forever. That all starts with treating your New Year’s Resolution like any other goal and following through.

How to Pick a Good New Year’s Resolution

Much of the reason people fail to keep their new year’s resolutions is that they pick resolutions that are tremendously difficult to keep in the first place. People who keep their new year’s resolutions start by picking resolutions that are keep-able in the first place.

Pick an achievable resolution

Many people fail to achieve their New Year’s Resolution because they try to shoot for the moon when all they have is a bottle rocket. They attempt something beyond the scope of their abilities and, in doing so, doom themselves to failure.

If you want to keep your new year’s resolution this year, pick a challenging but doable resolution.

What’s doable depends only on you. For some people, a resolution of running a marathon by the end of the year is doable, and for others, even walking three miles is unthinkable.

As a rule of thumb, anything that extends your maximum ability by a reasonable amount is doable. If you currently run a 5k a few times every year, running a 6-mile race is challenging but doable. If you currently struggle to lose weight, losing 60 lbs. by the end of the year is challenging but doable (it’s only 5lbs. a month). This brings me to my next point…

Break a big resolution down into a weekly or daily habit

It’s fun to look at resolutions in terms of big numbers — losing 60 lbs. in a year — but people don’t achieve any goal all at once. We do so one day at a time.

Someone losing 60lbs in a year is really losing 5 lbs. a month. They’re really losing 1.25lbs a week — a mere 0.17lbs a day. One pound of fat is 3000 calories, so 0.17lbs is 510 calories. 510 calories is 4 cans of soda, a bagel with butter or cream cheese, or a portion of potato chips. So, in reality, all someone needs to do to lose 60 lbs. a year is cut out their high-calorie snacks and perhaps do some light exercise like taking a walk. This small change to your daily routine can lose you a massive amount of weight over one year.¹

Or, consider writing a novel. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone has 76,944 words in it, so let’s assume your first novel will be 80,000 words. If you want to finish 80,000 words in a year, you must write 6,667 words a month. That’s 1,667 words a week, 238 words a day. 238 words a day is not a lot — the small portion of text in this article under the header “Break a big resolution down into a weekly or daily habit” is more than 238 words.

Most resolutions can be broken down into a daily habit, but some must be broken into a habit done several times a week. Examples of resolutions that can’t be turned into a daily change are running a marathon or becoming a weightlifter, as physical exercise requires rest and recovery days.

Break your resolution down into a daily habit unless it’s the kind that must have some rest days. In that case, break it down into a three-times-a-week habit.

Pick a resolution with a regular habit that’s achievable

Your regular habit should be achievable. It should be to do something that doesn’t require too much time or energy for you. It should be easy enough for you to do even on the difficult days (and with the world the way it is right now, there will be more than enough of those).

One example of a daily habit that works wonders for new writers is to answer one question on Quora every day. You can answer whatever question you want, and the length can be whatever you want, making it easy to scrape by on the shitty days by offering a short answer to an easy question.

One habit that’s worked for me has been to cook at least one meal at home every day. This habit is designed to help me prefer cooking at home instead of relying on fast food and restaurants. When I’m motivated, I will take an hour or two to chop produce and buy fresh fish and cook a lovely dinner for myself. On days I’m not motivated, I crack an egg over a frying pan, cook it, and slap it on a bagel. They’re both meals I cooked at home, and they both keep me away from drive-thrus and takeout.

It’s important to break your resolution down into a habit that you will always repeat, even on the bad days, because consistency is what determines your ability to build a new habit. One skipped day can turn into five skipped days and then a skipped month and then a broken resolution alarmingly quickly.

How to Make Sure You Keep Your New Year’s Resolution

The blunt fact of the matter is that willpower alone is not enough to keep the commitments we make ourselves. If willpower alone were enough, none of us would struggle with bad habits in the first place.

The reason willpower alone isn’t enough is that the part of our brain that controls rational thought evolved far later than our brain's parts that manage emotional experiences and trigger responses on impulse. And because these parts are older, they are far, far stronger.

The way to overcome this challenge is to make it easy for the impulsive, emotional parts of your brain to make the right decision when your prefrontal cortex is too tired or overwhelmed to take control. You do this by designing your environment to supports your goals.

Decide what you will do instead

Every good habit you form replaces some other bad habit. Cooking one meal every day replaces my habit of visiting my local Chipotle. Writing in the morning replaces your bad habit of scrolling on social media every morning.

Likewise, quitting a bad habit requires you to replace it with a good habit. If you resolve to quit smoking, you might decide to meditate on the desire to smoke when it arises instead of succumbing. If you resolve to quit checking social media so much, you might decide to play Duolingo when you get the urge to check social media.

Decide what old habit you will get rid of to support your resolution and what new habit will be the replacement.

Rearrange your home or change your devices to support your resolution

Once you’ve decided what old habit will go and what your new habit is going to be, change your environment to support these new habits.

• If you want to cut back on social media and replace it with Duolingo, delete your social media apps off your phone and put Duolingo on the home page.
• If you want to diet, give all the calorie-dense food in your house to the local food bank. When you go to the grocery store in the future, only buy the kind of healthy food you want to eat going forward. Store all your food behind closed cabinet or pantry doors, so the sight of food doesn’t tempt you to eat.
• If you want to go to the gym, get a gym membership to a gym that is as close as possible to your house. You are more likely to go if it doesn’t feel like a big excursion. Make sure your gym clothes are always clean and put away neatly to make it easy to get ready once you’ve decided to go.

The idea behind these changes is to make it easier to do what you want to do and harder to do what you don’t want.

This principle has worked to great effect for me. Over the last year, I’ve been seriously cutting back on the amount of cannabis I smoke, and one change that’s done more for me than any other is simply storing my vape on a high shelf in the closet in a box out of sight. When I kept my vape on the end table, it was easy to see it, grab it, and take a hit, but retrieving it from the closet requires me to first actively decide I want to smoke, then get up and drag over a stepstool to grab it — and it often turns out I don’t want to smoke that much. That small change alone cut the amount of cannabis I smoke by nearly two thirds.

Communicate your resolution to friends and family members

Peer pressure is a powerful force. When we’re teenagers, it can be the difference between studying and getting into a good school and falling pregnant. We can hijack the power of peer pressure to help us achieve our goals by telling our friends and loved ones to peer pressure us.

One of the greatest things about having this blog for me has been that people hold me accountable. If I say publicly in an article that I am not going to buy new clothes, or I am not going to use social media, then I consider doing these things, my friends are quick to say, “Oh, wow, I thought you weren’t going to do that…” The shame from being caught instantly kills my craving on the spot.

They don’t shame me to make me feel bad. If I told them not to do this because I was giving up these commitments, they would let me off the hook immediately. They shame me precisely because they support me and want me to achieve my goals.

If you have a new year’s resolution like “lose weight” or “quit smoking” and you have a spouse, chances are your spouse would love for you to achieve these things. Tell them what you’re doing, and they’ll rearrange the house and keep you on the right track at every opportunity. If you have one, your spouse can be the most powerful ally you have in the fight for a better life.

Friends can also be powerful allies if they also want better lives. Sometimes friends can stand in the way of our goals by peer pressuring us to drink or party when we don’t want to, but friends can also peer pressure us to stay away from junk food and do healthy things together. Let your friends know you’re trying to change your life, and together you can come up with ways to spend time together that support your goals.

• If your new year’s resolution is to stop spending so much money, you can hang out at home by buying alcohol and cooking together instead of going out to the bar and buying food & drinks there.
• If your new year’s resolution is to lose weight, you can invite friends to go to the gym with you. My experience is that when you are new to going to the gym, bringing a friend along eases your embarrassment, and you are more likely to get a good workout.

When it gets tough, tell yourself, “one more step.”

In my book Work Less, Finish More: How to Spend Less Time Working and Get More Done, I tell the story of how, when I first started working out, I used a little mental trick to motivate myself to get to the gym at 6 AM every morning.²

When I started to work out every day, I dragged myself out of bed at 6 AM, absolutely sure every day that I would turn right around and go home once I got to the gym.

But once I was there, I always said to myself, “since I’m already here, I might as well enjoy the sauna…” and after enjoying the sauna, I said to myself, “I could walk a mile on the treadmill…” and after that mile on the treadmill, the idea of lifting weights seemed kind of fun.

I told myself every day I could go home whenever I wanted, but I never did.

After a few weeks, I stopped even wanting to.

The trick was telling myself I could turn right around and go home once I started. And then, once I was there, I told myself I could go home after the sauna. I told myself, “one more step, and then you can go home.”

No matter how many interventions you make in your environment, no matter how helpful your friends are, there will be times when you face difficulty and temptation on the road to keeping your resolution. In those times, tell yourself “one more step.”

• If you are dieting and feel extremely tempted by a particular food, tell yourself, “If I still want it in an hour, I can come back and get it.”
• If you are trying to run a marathon but don’t want to train today, tell yourself, “I just have to put on my running shoes and walk off my porch.”
• If you are trying to save money, tell yourself, “If I still want this in 24 hours, I can come back and buy it.”

This trick works because, as mindfulness practitioners tell us, desires come and go. Emotional experiences often arise for less than twenty minutes before fading away into nothing. If you can outlast your temporary emotional experience, you often find you don’t want whatever you wanted anymore, and you can proceed as normal.

Keeping a new year’s resolution can be tough. I won’t pretend it can’t be. But you get better with practice. The first few weeks of building a new habit are tough, but once you’ve ingrained the habit, the rest of the year often sails by without a problem. If you can get through January, February, and March, you’re practically home clear.

So instead of overwhelming yourself by considering a year of deprivation, focus on doing your one, small, less-than-an-hour habit a day for a mere three months. A much easier commitment, wouldn’t you say?

Want to 10x Your Productivity?

If you want to stop wasting time and finally start getting stuff done, my free course 10x Your Productivity is what you need.

Sign up for 10x Your Productivity now!

1: I’m more than aware that the science of dieting is more complicated than this. But seemingly small lifestyle changes to diet and exercise can indeed yield impressive results over time, so my point still stands.

2: This is an affiliate link.