Hesitant about New Year's Resolutions?
Try Quarterly Goals Instead
Have your New Year's Resolutions ever worked?
Multiple studies show that New Year's resolutions don’t work for many people. Many people who’ve tried them have found the same thing.1
But don’t give up. Doing nothing is a mistake.
It’s akin to saying: “I know I need to improve, but I just can’t,” or even worse, “I don’t want to improve.”
But if New Year's Resolutions don’t work for you, what can you try instead?
Here’s an experiment I’m trying this quarter: instead of New Year's Resolutions, I’m trying Quarterly Goals. Leave a message or direct message me in the comments below if you’re also considering this!
What’s the difference between a resolution and a goal?
A resolution is usually a vague aspiration, whereas a (well-defined) goal is specific and measurable. Vague resolutions make it difficult to measure progress (or lack thereof). Well-defined goals are often easier to measure.
Advantages of Quarterly vs Annual Goals
Focusing on quarterly goals instead of annual goals enables you to:
Run experiments
Reassess frequently (ask: is this working? Why or why not?)
Revise your goal or system as needed (we’ll discuss systems more below)
How to Systematically Work Toward Your Goals
You might find the following framework to be a helpful way to think about achieving your goals.
Once you define and select what you are trying to achieve, call these your goals. You can call them “end-goals” if you prefer.
Unless these goals are activities themselves, you’ll need to define and implement a set of activities to achieve the goals.
You can call these organized activities “systems” or “procedures” or “processes” or some similar word that helps you be very clear about the difference between means (how you get there) and goals (where you’re trying to get).
An end-goal is a goal such as, “Lose four pounds this month,” or “Generate ten qualified sales leads from my next presentation,” or “Read three challenging books.”
The system or process you may use to get there could be something like:“Run three times every week,” or, “Try Dan Kennedy’s sales techniques in my next presentation with confidence” or “Read a little every day.” Systems are actions that you do regularly, and they help you make something a habit.
In some cases, systems can be the goals themselves. For example, maybe you don’t care how much you read, as long as you read every day.
Experimenting with systems can help you figure out how achieve your end-goal, especially when you don’t already know how to reach your end goal.
Run experiments on your systems
Running experiments allows you to iterate on your systems. Iteration enables you to find systems that work for you.
Here’s what I mean.
By “experiments,” I mean committing to a system for a certain period of time. Then, you reassess.
The practical advantage of setting a quarterly experiment – as opposed to a year-long resolution – is that you can gather data about whether your system works for you.
For example, let’s say you’ve had an extremely stressful year, and the stress is taking a toll on your health. Your goal is to become more relaxed, but you don’t know how to be more relaxed.
So, you can experiment. Let’s say you decide to commit to meditating six days per week for an entire quarter.
If you run this as an experiment, you’ll reassess at the end of the quarter to figure out whether meditation is helping achieve your desired relaxation. Did a daily meditation help your stress? If so, did it help enough that you’d find continuing worthwhile? If not, perhaps you need to try some other form of stress-relief, such as working out or taking yoga classes.
In addition to a practical advantage, there’s a mental advantage of quarterly experiments as opposed to year-long experiments.
The mental advantage is that by providing a higher number of ‘re-set’ points, if you failed during one quarter, you didn’t necessarily fail for the whole year. Some people are motivated by new opportunities to “reset”, even if these opportunities are somewhat arbitrary – like the first day of a month or of a year. (Other people aren’t. If you’re not one of those people, then the above observation may be irrelevant to you.)
Regardless of whether reset points help you, the focused opportunity to evaluate lets you ask why you learn from your failures or your successes.
Let’s say you only meditated regularly for the first month of your quarterly resolution. Maybe you have enough data to know whether meditation was helpful to you. If so, you can make an informed decision about whether to continue.
And maybe you don’t have enough information about whether or not meditation helps you. In that case, you can interrogate your failure. You can ask yourself why you didn’t keep up your meditation schedule.
In that case, you can tell yourself: “I’ll try that resolution next quarter.” You don’t have to feel bad that you’ve ‘failed’ this quarter.
Also, quarterly experiments might be more fun! You can view them as a chance to gather data, as a game, rather than as a set of rules or resolutions you must follow.
Reassess frequently – reminders and accountability
Quarterly goals or experiments give you the ability to frequently re-assess your goals and your progress. Re-assessment reminds you of your goals, and enables you to keep track of progress. Keeping track of progress can inspire you to get closer to meeting a goal.
On December 1st of this year, I looked back at my list of New Year's goals for earlier this year. I was disappointed that not only had I failed to accomplish many of the goals – I’d simply forgotten that some of them existed.
Had I been reviewing my goals quarterly, I would not have forgotten that they existed. I might have decided that they’re not important, but I would not simply have forgotten about them.
It sucks that I simply forgot. At this point in my life, I’d rather make an active decision not to pursue something than fail to pursue it because “I forgot.” (What a lame excuse!)
Reassessment also enables you to monitor your progress. Monitoring has been proven to help some people achieve their goals with more regularity. The American Psychological Association noted in a 32-page paper on monitoring, “…the findings suggest that monitoring goal progress is an effective self-regulation strategy, and that interventions that increase the frequency of progress monitoring are likely to promote behavior change.”2
Anecdotally, Substack writer Renee Kapuku notes that mid-year check-ins are quite important to help her achieve her goals.
Revise
After you have reassessed, you can revise your goal. The advantage of reassessing quarterly is that you have more opportunities to get back on track – to figure out what’s not working and why – or to celebrate your progress.
If you’re assessing an end-goal, you can ask whether you’re able to hit that goal. If not, you can figure out what to do differently.
It might also turn out that a goal isn’t important to you anymore. If you discover that’s the case, you can make a conscious decision not to pursue it – and you don’t need to feel bad about it.
Summary
If you’ve struggled to keep New Year's resolutions in the past, give quarterly goals a try!
What quarterly goal(s) are you going to try?
Leave a few lines in the comments to let me know!
Also, if this post helped you at all, please consider sharing it with a few friends who might also find it interesting.
1According to a 2022 study, “46% of the resolvers [people who made New Year's Resolutions] were continuously successful, as compared to 4% of non-resolvers [people who did not make New Year's Resolutions].” This implies that more than half – 54% -- of people who did resolve to change their ways were unsuccessful in doing so. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11920693/
2 https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/bul-bul0000025.pdf