Setting strategic New Year resolutions

How should you go about choosing your New Year's resolutions?

At the beginning of the year, we often set goals for ourselves: lose weight, read more, scroll less, travel.

But how do you know if traveling or reading more is really the right goal for you?

Much is written about structuring and tracking goals: setting SMART goals, public commitments, and sharing goals with friends. But how to pick the right goals?

So here it is! This is the guide on how to pick the right New Year resolutions.

The need for your 3-5 year vision

You may not need a specific 5-year goal, but having a 3-5 year vision is essential.

What are you optimizing for in the mid to long-term?

While 1 year seems like a long timeline, it's actually really short.

I don't mean 1 year is a short amount of time because of that "wow, time really flew by this year" effect. Rather, because making tangible progress in any meaningful human endeavor within a single year is actually freakishly hard!

Most significant human pursuits take significantly more than 1 year of dedicated effort to accomplish.

And it'll be really challenging for you to achieve those significant human pursuits if you don't align the work you're doing this year with them.

What values are you optimizing for?

The way to start outlining your 3-5 year vision is to clarify your values.

Values don't need to be complicated; they're just your best understanding of what you value. What are the things you want to nurture?

Common personal values are family, health, money, tranquility, and traveling.

Common professional values are title, culture, work, salary, work-life balance, company reputation, and mission.

Those are just some of the common value categories, but there are many others. You can choose whatever you want; there's virtually no limit on what can be a value, as long as it's something you value.

But these value categories can conflict. Pursuing a value can negatively affect other areas, and focusing on some values can mean you won't nurture other areas.

While there's no limit to how many things you choose as a value, there's definitely a limit to how much you can nurture all your values.

So clarify the values you're optimizing for: you don't need to get fancy yet (although fancy helps); it can be as simple as "Well, I just want to make sure I take care of my family, have job stability, and time to work on my car on the weekends."

The important part is having some idea, any idea, of what matters to you over the long term. This allows you to make short-term decisions that lead you toward your vision instead of away from it.

Once you have a better long-term vision, you can create your new year resolutions.

Choosing resolutions based on your values

For instance, you might have mentioned wanting to exercise more, read more, or travel.

But is that a strategic goal that leads you closer to your values, or just a reaction to things you wish you had more time for?

For example, if one of your values is your family, you must have New Year resolutions that nurture them — allocating time with the kids on weekends, having date nights 3x a month, starting that college fund, etc. Reading more won't help with those, so don't pick that!

Be careful: we can rationalize everything. We can always say, "Soccer helps me nurture my value of family because when I decompress, I'm able to be more present to them," or whatever. We do intellectual laps to get where we want, and we can get really good at it.

Don't do that. Don't fool yourself. If you want to be more present for your family, have that as the goal. And if you need to play soccer to decompress to achieve it, so be it. But ensure you are holding yourself accountable to directly nurturing your values.

Now, how many resolutions to have? To nurture your values, you must have resolutions aligned with your values.

Because there's no limit to how many values you have, there's no upper limit to how many resolutions you have, but the minimum should be 1 per value.

Reflect: If you're not deliberately trying to improve one of your values over a whole year, is that really something you value?

That's why having a list of values is so important: you need to know in which direction your destination lies to decide which trail you must walk.

And walking trails is already pretty hard; no need to make it harder by not knowing if it gets you any closer to where you want to be.

After you have goals aligned with your values, you can follow all the best practices for goal setting and tracking for these resolutions: SMART goals, public commitments, tracking on paper, accountability buddies, etc. Suit yourself.

But knowing your values will help you create the right goals.

No amount of great goal setting, tracking, and achieving is good if you have the wrong goals.

So, how do you put this into practice?

Choosing New Year resolutions in practice

A lot of the practice of New Year Resolutions setting is answering this critical question:

"Why do I want that to be my New Year resolution?"

Why lose weight? Why read more? Why travel? Why change jobs, or gun for that promotion? Why learn the piano?

Pursuing an endeavor for a year without clear meaning, without the backing of a value, is incredibly hard. That's a significant reason why many of us fail to keep our resolutions past February.

So here's how you answer that important question.

1) Clarify your values:

It can be a simple list or a sophisticated matrix, but you need to have your values outlined somewhere.

• What are the things you value?
• What areas must you nurture?
• What are you optimizing for?

There's no need to understand the why behind those. You don't need to say, "I value my kids because I'm not a psychopath, Dui!"

Your values are your list of Why's, and we're not trying to go much above that right now. They are the ends in and of themselves for you.

2) Diagnose your current situation

This requires you to answer "What's going on right now?" for each of your values.

If health is one of your values, then what's up with your health?

• Are you sleeping poorly?
• Stressed?
• Have headaches?
• Not exercising?
• Depressed?

For each option, there's a different thing to do about it.

If you're having trouble sleeping, you may decide to do something different from if you're depressed.

But you need to understand where you are today, a diagnosis, so you can define what you plan to do about it.

3) Choose at least a resolution for each value:

Reflect on your diagnosis and choose resolutions to nurture that value.

If your value is health and you are stressed and not exercising, then you likely should:

• Enroll in a gym and workout at least 3x a week
• Read books on stress management and exercise
• Directly address your stressors: Change managers, find a babysitter, or save enough of a rainy day fund.

The stressors part clarifies why a diagnosis is important: If you're stressed with your partner, you must address your relationship. If you're stressed with your finances, you must manage your debts.

That's it.

1) Values, 2) Diagnosis, 3) Resolutions

Make sure you have at least a resolution per value, and you're done choosing resolutions! Congratulations!

Now, the hard work of actually achieving resolutions begins.

Prioritization is a crucial part of life

We have limited resources: be it time, money, attention, or energy, there's only so much we can invest.

New Year resolutions are an excellent opportunity to define and invest in your priorities.

So make the most of it: focus on not only setting goals you'll achieve but be mindful to set the right goals.

Not only will this approach help you make progress toward what's most important to you, but it will also help you develop an important skill:

The skill of living your day-to-day according to your values.