Happy New Year! To me, a new year is like a freshly-bought notebook full of clean pages. I love that glowy feeling of newness and possibility, and I usually spend a good portion of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day writing down grand schemes and goals that I’ll definitely, absolutely, 100% make happen, no matter what.
But I’ll tell you a couple secrets: I’m also a first-rate planner. I’ve got the specific and measurable and time-bound parts of the SMART goal-setting strategy down pat.
But the other parts? The attainable and realistic parts?
Hahahaha nope. I'm a chronic time and energy optimist, and it shows.
I’m far from alone. Do a quick internet search and you’ll find that just 9% of people actually follow through with their New Year’s resolutions.
I’m hoping to do better this year. Really. By the time 2025 rolls around, I want to look at my goals for this year and think: Check. Check. Check. Chances are you want this, too.
Why do I think this year will be any different? Because I’m trying two new strategies. And maybe if you give them a try, your year will be different, too!
Strategy #1: Plan Time Rather Than Tasks
I’ll still be making a list of resolutions for the year, which I will then go on to break down into quarterly, monthly, and weekly tasks. But I'm going to go about achieving them in a different way—by taking a time-oriented approach rather than a task-oriented one.
For example, instead of saying, “I need to write three blog posts this week,” I’m going to say, “I will work on blog posts for five hours on Tuesday.” Maybe those three blog posts will get done, or maybe I’ll need more time to finish them up next week. But once the time for that task is up, it’s up. Time to move on to something else.
I’ll be honest, taking this approach feels counterintuitive and scary to me. But I need it. I’m great at creating artificial pressure for myself around certain things. If I’m not careful, that pressure can quickly take over my life, and that’s when other really important things, like eating healthy and walking the dog and reading to my kids and getting enough sleep, fly right out the window.
I suck at drawing boundaries, especially with my work. I’m terrible at telling myself I’ve accomplished enough for now and that I have to move on to other things in order to keep myself in balance.
Considering the constant conversations about “work/life balance” going on in the past few years, I’m pretty sure I’m far from alone on this.
Of course, I will have deadlines for my editing projects, and those I will prioritize. But for the other projects associated with my writing, my editing business, and other aspects of my life, I will choose to prioritize spending a certain amount of time on certain tasks, rather than focusing on how many tasks I “need to” get done in a day or a week.
Strategy #2: Make Big Plans for the Year, Then Edit by 30-50%
This idea hurts my optimist heart a little. No one likes being told that fitting a big, beautiful plan into a perfect, compact time frame is a delusion of grandeur. But that’s exactly what I need to do for myself.
I tend to decide that EVERYTHING is a top priority. Then I tell myself that my only option is just to make it all happen.
Case in point: At the start of last month, I decided I would write a whole quarter’s worth of blog posts in a month so I could then focus on other things. That’s twenty-four blog posts. In December. DECEMBER, y’all.
I made a very valiant effort during the first two weeks, but even when I was writing during every spare moment—even when I created more spare moments by arranging extra childcare for my toddler—I couldn’t do it.
My kids got sick. I got sick. We had family and neighborhood parties to attend. I had Christmas shopping to do. I had opportunities to serve my family and community. I started potty training my toddler. And there’s also the tiny detail of me getting totally sick of writing blog posts.
One day, as I was feverishly typing, my husband came into the room and joked I was exactly like Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton—writing like I was running out of time.
I laughed, but I also felt called out (in a good way). I wasn’t running out of time, not really. I had created a mindset of false scarcity by setting such a huge goal for myself, and it wasn’t really doing me any good.
I had dreamed way too big, and then I burned myself out trying to achieve it.
So I’m trying to learn from this mistake (and many, many others) and I’m going to work on toning it down in 2024. I’ll still give the time-and-energy optimist part of me some space to dream big as I look ahead. It’s fun to dream big. It’s like an outlet for me.
But then I’ll be taking out a figurative red pen and reworking those big plans into something more manageable. I’ll be more intentional about weeding out what really does and doesn’t need to be prioritized. I’ll keep reminding myself that I don’t need to do everything all at once—that everything I want to achieve is going to take time, as it should. I keep reminding myself that small, consistent baby steps forward will get me farther than one or two all-out sprints that leave me injured and exhausted.
Wrapping Up
I’m excited for 2024. I’m excited to try these new strategies and see if I can shift the way I make goals, the way I think about them, and the way I go about trying to achieve them. Hopefully, this means I’ll be setting myself up for consistent, balanced success in 2024.
How are you setting yourself up for success in your New Year’s Resolutions?
Happy New Year, happy goal-setting, and happy writing!
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