#57: New Year's Resolutions Actually Work Amazingly Well
There is something to the flip of the calendar.
This year I…
wrote 6 books and published 3 (including a planner and bullet journal for authors )
published 200+ articles
drew more than 300 sketches and
finished the first draft of the novel I have been writing for seven years.
I not only met the goals I had set for myself at the start of 2021 but exceeded them. Yet I belong to the same bandwangon which bellows at this time of the year - New Year’s Resolutions Don’t Work.
My unfounded belief got shattered by David Epstein’s this week’s newsletter, where he introduced me to Katy Milkman’s book How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be.
Many argue January 1st is just another day, a pretty ordinary day to start a new goal, but research by Milkman and others shows that is precisely wrong. January 1st isn’t just another day when it comes to behavioral change.
In 2012, Katy Milkman was hired by Google to find out why their employees don’t take advantage of several perks offered to them at a significant cost that is meant to help them save for retirement, exercise, eat better, learn new skills, stop smoking, and use social media in moderation.
Google Vice President mainly wanted to know: Does those perks' timing matter? That seems like a counterintuitive query. Shouldn’t benefits just be offered all the time to maximize the opportunity? But Milkman found: timing is incredibly important. Most people start a new project or a new habit on a Monday, or ist of a month, or the start of a year. People instinctively gravitate toward moments that feel like fresh starts when they want to make change happen.
Some calendar dates seem to provoke larger reactions than others. For instance, New Year’s typically exerts a far more significant influence on behavior than, say, your typical Monday. So do other landmarks such as birthdays or anniversaries. The more prominent the landmark, the more likely it is to help people take a step back, regroup, and make a clean break from the past.
In my opinion, New Year’s resolutions are great! So are spring resolutions, birthday resolutions, and Monday resolutions. Any time you make a resolution, you’re putting yourself in the game. Too often, a sense that change is difficult and daunting prevents us from taking the leap to try. Maybe you like the idea of making a change, but actually doing it seems hard, and so you feel unmotivated to start. Maybe you’ve failed when you attempted to change before and expect to fail again. Often, change takes multiple attempts to stick. - Katy Milkman
A 2007 survey, which found that about 80 percent of New Year’s resolutions fail to take hold, feels disappointing — until you consider that it leaves 20 percent of goal-setters who made a successful change thanks to a flip of the calendar.
Rather than perceiving time as a continuum, we think about our lives in “episodes,” creating story arcs from the notable incidents. Milkman likens it to new chapters in a book, each marking a shift in identity such as when you moved out from home, got married, had children, retired. New chapters — even minor ones — can be leveraged to improve our behaviors.
Her research help us develop the idea that the start of a new life chapter, no matter how small, might give us the impression of a clean slate. These new chapters are moments when the labels we use to describe ourselves, who we are, and whatever behaviours we are stuck into and compelling us to shift out of them.
An ideal time to consider pursuing change is after a fresh start. Fresh starts increase your motivation to change because they give you either a natural clean slate or the impression of one; they relegate your failures more cleanly to the past, and they boost your optimism about the future. They can also disrupt bad habits and lead you to think bigger picture about your life.
Here is to a fresh start.
A Planner and Bullet Journal. It has everything you will need to have a productive and stress-free year. Check it out here.
Happy New Year!
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Happy New year Neera. Your attitude and writing style was the first thing I admire about you.since the one year I have known you. You set goals and stick with them to the end. I hope one day to get to half of where you are.with the courage to complete a task. Thanks for sharing this amazing article.