How to stick to your new year’s resolutions, using startup tools
Use OKRs to fight procrastination and attain your objectives
If you’re like most people, you have made some kind of new year’s resolution. If you’re like most people, you will not stick to it and will feel bad about yourself at the end of the year. Fortunately, it’s possible to avoid falling in that trap, and management tools developed for start-ups can help. In this post, I’ll explain the psychology of failed resolutions and show how you can use OKRs to keep yourself motivated and stick to them.
Why new year’s resolutions fail
According to a survey released by the American Psychological Association, 93% of respondents made a resolution to change some aspect of their behavior in 2012. However, a longitudinal study of resolvers showed that only 19% stuck to their resolution for two years. Why is it so?
“According to APA’s 2011 Stress in America survey, released in January 2012, one in four reported that willpower (27 percent) or time (26 percent) prevented them from making the change they were trying to achieve.”
Oh did people not keep their resolutions because they lacked time or willpower?
Saying you failed to keep your resolution because you lacked willpower is like saying you got fat because you put on weight. While it’s true, it’s not really helpful, is it? To understand why people fail to keep their resolutions, we need to look into what these resolutions look like.
Quoting the same survey by the American Psychological Association:
“57 percent reported a goal to lose weight [and] 52 percent reported a goal to save more money”
Losing weight or saving money are easy to understand and inspirational goals. Most of us wanted to do either one of them at some moment. The problem with such a goal is that it’s vague and daunting. It’s not easy to know where to start, and much less whether you’re on track. Say we’re on January 10th, you had resolved to lose weight, and you just had a second helping of that delicious cheesecake. Does it mean that your resolution is now out of reach? Certainly not. Likewise, if you ended your January 10th with a bowl of quinoa, it wouldn’t mean that you’re done, either.
What works
The longitudinal study of New Year’s change attempts shows some hints into what helps keep resolutions, by examining the (small) group who kept true to theirs:
“Successful resolvers reported significantly more use of stimulus control (e.g., kept things around to remind you not to give in to the problem) at each of the five intervals.”
“Stimulus control was the only coping process to reliably predict success across all five data analysis points.”
By keeping things around that reminded them of their challenge, the successful resolvers managed to keep temptation at bay and stay true to their objective. But when the task is big and daunting, it may be hard to know how to keep track of it.
There, Wait But Why’s excellent post about beating procrastination is helpful (emphasis mine):
“Effective planning turns a daunting item into a series of small, clear, manageable tasks:
A remarkable, glorious achievement is just what a long series of unremarkable, unglorious tasks looks like from far away.
No one “builds a house.” They lay one brick again and again and again and the end result is a house. Procrastinators are great visionaries — they love to fantasize about the beautiful mansion they will one day have built — but what they need to be are gritty construction workers, who methodically lay one brick after the other, day after day, without giving up, until a house is built.”
So there we have it, in short: to stick to your resolution, you have to be able to keep track of it regularly. And to keep track of it, a big and daunting task has to be broken down into small, manageable tasks, that you’ll be able to track along the way.
And that’s where OKRs, a management tool, can help.
How OKRs can help
OKR, for objectives and key results, is a project management framework created by Andy Grove at Intel in the 1970s. Since then, OKR have been adopted by numerous companies, among which Google. I’ve written about them at more length here, in the professional context, so I’ll just make a simple intro here. Objectives and key results, as their name implies, work by setting objectives, which are big and inspiring goals, and associating them to key results. Key results should be tangible, and most importantly they should be measurable.
In the case of a New Year’s resolution, the resolution itself would be your objective: lose weight, get in shape, save more money, and so on.
However, while this objective may feel big and daunting on its own, it becomes much more manageable once you associate it with key results. If your resolution is to get in shape, some measurable key results could be:
Go to the gym twice per week
Walk 10'000 steps per day
Eat home cooked meals 4 nights a week
If your objective is to save money, your key results could include going to restaurants less often, not using your credit card or putting money in a change jar every day.
By having these clear key results, you will at every instant be able to see whether you’re on track. But most importantly, you will know what you need to do, right now, to get to your objective. You will never get yourself to start if your objective for the day is to “get in shape”. However, if it’s to “walk 3000 more steps”, it becomes a much more manageable and understandable task. And as Tim Urban said in Wait But Why: “A remarkable, glorious achievement is just what a long series of unremarkable, unglorious tasks looks like from far away.”
A remarkable, glorious achievement is just what a long series of unremarkable, unglorious tasks looks like from far away — Wait But Why
I’m writing right now. It’s 2AM. The kids are asleep. Do you think I do it out of some superhuman intrinsic motivation? I don’t. I do it because I set myself as an objective to establish a regular writing process, and I have as a key result to spend at least 3 hours per week writing. And now I have a spreadsheet that looks at me menacingly and helps me fight the appeal of my bed to write a couple extra hundred words.
Using OKRs for personal improvement
While OKRs take a while to get right, they are easy to get started with. In the case of a New Year’s resolution, your process will be :
Set yourself a goal. That’s the resolution: what do you want to do? Lose weight? Save more? Or maybe take over the world?
Research how to get there. You want to lose weight? Read what works and what doesn’t. You want to learn how to code? Read about people who have done it. What did they do?
Break your goal into small tasks, matching what you’ve learned
Set yourself as key results the attainment of some of these. It may be hitting the gym thrice a week to lose weight, drinking 8 cups of water per day to be in better shape, or whatever.
Keep track of your key results. Write them down on paper, or make a spreadsheet, but keep a place where you’ll be able to see how well you’re doing
At the end of a period, check what worked and what didn’t. For the key results you didn’t achieve: why was that? Did you lack motivation? Were the key results not the right ones? Ask yourself how to correct that…
… and then write another, uptated, and improved OKR!
Some additional tips
Research tells us a couple of other things we can be weary of. Again, per the longitudinal study of New Year’s change attempts:
Two processes were employed significantly more by the unsuccessful group throughout the change experience: self-blame (e.g., criticize, lecture, or blame yourself) and wishful thinking (e.g., wished the problem would go away and somehow be over with).
On the other hand:
Self-liberation (e.g., willpower) and reinforcement management (e.g., rewarded yourself for changing) discriminated between the groups at 4 and 3 of the follow-up contacts, respectively, with the successful group employing more of each process.
So in short, use carrots and not sticks. Don’t blame yourself for failing, but reward yourself for sticking to your goals.
In addition, I’ve found that partnering up for OKRs is a great motivator. I’m doing mine with a friend, who is not at all in the same field as me nor wants to achieve the same objectives. However, we’re able to share our OKRs and our experiences in keeping them, and having someone to report to is a tremendous motivator, through simple peer pressure.
Wrapping up
There you have it. A very simple method that will boost your New Year’s resolutions from unattainable, vague goals, to daily, measurable commitments. To recap:
Set yourself an objective. It should be an inspirational goal
Tie that objective to key results. They should be tangible and measurable
Along the year, track whether you are reaching your results or not
If possible, share your progress with someone
This way, you’ll know at all times what you should do to reach your ultimate goal, and you will know how well you’re doing to get there.
