How to structure your New Year’s resolutions into goals
Every year it’s the same thing, people decide they will do differently, that it will be a “year of change” and that they will achieve much more. Coincidentally, the year ends the same every time, a lack of perspective and difficulty in answering a simple question, “How did I do?”.
For me, that has always been the key question. Sure, it’s about achieving my goals and moving further in life, but the simple understanding of how my year went gives me such a sense of progress that is hard to understate. Human’s are horrible at understanding progress, we lack the perspective of the past and always feel like we are stuck in a constant state. So, I urge you to at least sit-down and write down your goals, maybe you won’t achieve them all but at least you’ll know if you progressed or not.
Maybe just writing down all your goals works for you, and that’s fine, the important thing is to find a method that fits your schedule and you stay consistent, consistency is key here. That said, I would like to share the way I do as I feel it covers all aspects of our lives and allows you to see a complete picture of where we will be by the end of the year. I have tried numerous methods over the years and have learned with my mistakes on ways to improve them and make them easier to do and follow.
This method is broken down into 5 steps and I have also included a template below to make it easier for you to follow :)
It’s important to note that I use OKRs for this method if you’ve never heard of this, feel free to have a read here.
1. Pillar & Vision
The first thing to do is to answer one simple question, “What are the pillars of my life?”. I know it sounds complicated and abstract, but bear with me. In this case, pillars are parts of your life and all of them together should show a complete picture of where you want to be. Here are my pillars:
- Health & Fitness — Self-explanatory, also includes mental health
- Learning — What are the main things I want to learn this year
- Career — What leaps will I make in my career? Maybe a promotion, a horizontal shift, etc.
- Important People — Who are the important people in your life, this includes family, friends, partners, and anyone else you consider important
- Experiences — What do you want to experience this year, could be visiting a new country, skydiving, anything.
- Lifestyle — These are habits and behaviours you have and might want to keep or change, such as budgeting every month, reading once a day, etc.
Feel free to use these pillars or add any that you feel are missing.
After you’ve established your pillars, it’s time to do a very non-restrictive brainstorming and answer the following question “How do I see my self in [ Pillar name] by the end of the year?”.
Keep in mind that these can be qualitative and without any structure, it’s just about getting our thoughts down and start creating that image of the end of the year. This step is important as it allows us to think freely of where we want to be, without any restrictions that we might make on ourselves. An example for Health & Fitness could be:
- Feel good about my body at the beach
- Be able to run with my kids without feeling out of breath
- Swim from one side of the beach to the other
- Get rid of my knee pain
Notice there is no structure right now, it’s just a bunch of random thoughts of things I want to achieve. Do the same thing for each of the pillars.
2. Objectives
Now that we’ve put all our thoughts down, we have to structure this into something that is more concise and shows our objective for the year. Taking the thoughts I put in the last section, I see that some common trends are consolidating my cardio fitness, increasing muscle mass, decreasing body fat and improving on some pain. Right now it’s up to you if you are going to create multiple or only one objective per pillar but I tend to stick to one as it seems simpler for me. Therefore my objective would be stitching all of those together:
Improve body look, cardio ability and get rid of pains.
It doesn’t look good, but it works!
Now do the same thing for all the pillars, remember that you don’t have to be super picky about the objective looking good, it’s just about consolidating our objective, into one simple sentence.
3. Key Results
We have our objective but now that we think about it, what do “Improve body look, cardio ability and get rid of pains” even mean? How much do we want to improve and most importantly, how do we make sure we achieved this objective? That’s where the Key Results (KRs) come in.
KRs are a way to put numbers on our objective, they are quantifiable and can be proved without a doubt that they have been achieved or not. For example, one of my objectives is to improve body look, in number language this means:
- 85 kg, with 13% bodyfat.
And that is something we can prove (with a scale). For each objective, I tend to use 3–5 KRs but of course, it can vary (more than 5 seems like overkill though). Some ideas of KRs for Health & Fitness would be:
- Run a Marathon
- Run for 20 mins at least 2x per week
Normally my KRs are either a milestone, like 85kg or a Marathon, or construction of a habit, such as running 2x per week (I’ll go into more details on how to track later).
4. Short Term Key Results
With our KRs in place, we would normally stop here, but over the years I’ve noticed that this is not enough. In the years I stopped here, I always felt like these goals were still very far away. Sure they were quantifiable and written down, but the seemed so far that it didn’t make sense to start now (even though it should). So I decided to include one more category, which is intermediary Key Results, or Short Term KRs.
The idea here is to create checkpoints or deadlines for our actions, or as I like to call them, Panic Monsters (watch here if you don’t know these). I have felt that this way it’s much easier to see that we have to act now if we want to achieve our goals. The goals are created in whatever timeframe you want, but I tend to stick to Quarters, so every quarter I create a different short term key result.
To do this, all you do is for each Key Result, you create a key result that is slightly easier for goals that are milestone-based (such as running a Marathon) and for habit-based goals, you can just copy the same goal or make them more progressive, for example:
Running a 10k race in 3 months seems a lot more feasible that a Marathon in 12, that’s because humans are horrible at forecasting their future.
5. Create Triggers and Visual Cues
That’s it! Our goals are set and now we just have to accomplish them. This, of course, is the hardest part, but there are ways to make it easier. For me, it was always very common to have this whole ceremony of planning my year out and stuffing this in a random Google Sheets and forgetting about it. That’s why the last step is to create triggers and visual cues.
The objective here is to create mechanisms that remind you that when you were inspired after new years, you actually set goals for yourself and now it’s up to the future and present-you to accomplish them. I do this in many ways:
- I print out page 5 from the Google Sheet and stick it in multiple walls of my house.
- I download a habit tracker app that allows me to track my recurrent activities and daily send me a notification asking if I’ve done task X.
- Set my laptop background to Sheet 5.
And the list goes on, just make sure you have to see your goals every day.
I hope all of this makes sense and helps at least one soul out there that is struggling to plan out their year.
