How To Achieve New Year Resolutions
We are already four days into the new year. You may or may not have broken your new year resolutions yet. Or probably you have no resolutions at all.
Having a resolution list helps, even if you break them on some days. Even if you fail to stick to your resolution of exercising every day for 4 times in a week, you would still have exercised for 3 days!
Resolutions give a direction to the year. Just like how the Chinese new years have an animal associated with each year, a major goal gets associated with an year when you have a list - the year of money, the year of career etc.
But how do you track so many resolutions all at once? A habit tracker in a bullet journal definitely helps. Seeing the unbroken streak keeps you going.
How do you even remember to do them? A To-Do list helps. As I mentioned in earlier posts, I rely so much on Google Keep to list down things to do, blog ideas, groceries to buy, etc.
Have a cue for a new habit. For example, read a book when in a commute. Here commute is the cue and reading is the habit. This is just like the drinking game where you drink on cue. This helps because the cues come automatically and thus triggering the new habit easily.
What if you have too many resolutions that demand more than 24 hours? I know many of my friends who sacrifice sleep to achieve this - they sleep 4-6 hours on an average. Personally, I wouldn't go for it, as I fail to function without 8 hours of sleep. My energy levels are low through out the day, when I have less sleep, making the day very unproductive. Even if your body seems to be cool with 4-6 hours of sleep, there are many researches that claim that sleeping less will have long term side effects on health.
So, what's the alternative? 30 day challenges! Or n-day challenges, depending on your goal.
We can't write a book, cook 3 meals a day, have a 9 to 5 job, work on coding side project, train for marathon, learn Haka and become President all at a time. This would be a bucket list and not a resolutions list. Pick few from your bucket list and sort them by priority. Take a 30 day cooking challenge, NaNoWriMo challenge to write a book in November, 30 days of coding challenge in Hacker Rank and so on. The cool part about these n-day challenges is that they automatically come with deadlines(nth day).
If you have this gigantic goal, then break it down into smaller specific goals and then take n-day challenge. For example, if your goal is to lose 20 kgs, you can break it down to 3-4 kgs loss per month for 5-6 months.
Don't let major chunks of time go by in trivial but unavoidable activities. Use them to work on your big resolutions. Pocket those little time slots that just go by in mindless mobile browsing - waiting in a queue or for someone, commute, etc. Add an extra attribute to the things in your To-Do lists - time needed to do it. Then it becomes easy to map your To-Do list item with the time slot. For example, if you have an item in your To-Do list to make a call and follow up with someone with 5 minutes as time needed, you can easily do this when you have a five minute slot waiting for your coffee.
And don't let the broken resolutions undermine you. Keep going :)
~
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| New Year Resolutions List |
Having a resolution list helps, even if you break them on some days. Even if you fail to stick to your resolution of exercising every day for 4 times in a week, you would still have exercised for 3 days!
Resolutions give a direction to the year. Just like how the Chinese new years have an animal associated with each year, a major goal gets associated with an year when you have a list - the year of money, the year of career etc.
But how do you track so many resolutions all at once? A habit tracker in a bullet journal definitely helps. Seeing the unbroken streak keeps you going.
 |
| Habit Tracker Grid |
How do you even remember to do them? A To-Do list helps. As I mentioned in earlier posts, I rely so much on Google Keep to list down things to do, blog ideas, groceries to buy, etc.
Have a cue for a new habit. For example, read a book when in a commute. Here commute is the cue and reading is the habit. This is just like the drinking game where you drink on cue. This helps because the cues come automatically and thus triggering the new habit easily.
What if you have too many resolutions that demand more than 24 hours? I know many of my friends who sacrifice sleep to achieve this - they sleep 4-6 hours on an average. Personally, I wouldn't go for it, as I fail to function without 8 hours of sleep. My energy levels are low through out the day, when I have less sleep, making the day very unproductive. Even if your body seems to be cool with 4-6 hours of sleep, there are many researches that claim that sleeping less will have long term side effects on health.
So, what's the alternative? 30 day challenges! Or n-day challenges, depending on your goal.
We can't write a book, cook 3 meals a day, have a 9 to 5 job, work on coding side project, train for marathon, learn Haka and become President all at a time. This would be a bucket list and not a resolutions list. Pick few from your bucket list and sort them by priority. Take a 30 day cooking challenge, NaNoWriMo challenge to write a book in November, 30 days of coding challenge in Hacker Rank and so on. The cool part about these n-day challenges is that they automatically come with deadlines(nth day).
If you have this gigantic goal, then break it down into smaller specific goals and then take n-day challenge. For example, if your goal is to lose 20 kgs, you can break it down to 3-4 kgs loss per month for 5-6 months.
Don't let major chunks of time go by in trivial but unavoidable activities. Use them to work on your big resolutions. Pocket those little time slots that just go by in mindless mobile browsing - waiting in a queue or for someone, commute, etc. Add an extra attribute to the things in your To-Do lists - time needed to do it. Then it becomes easy to map your To-Do list item with the time slot. For example, if you have an item in your To-Do list to make a call and follow up with someone with 5 minutes as time needed, you can easily do this when you have a five minute slot waiting for your coffee.
And don't let the broken resolutions undermine you. Keep going :)
~
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