We’ve done it. We’ve made it to a new year.

The end of the year is traditionally a time of celebration and reflection, a time of looking at what we have achieved and, perhaps, what we could have done a little better, and it is also a time of looking forward to a fresh new start — a clean slate. Who knew the anniversary of a rock circling a star would stimulate such concerted thought!

Now is also the time where readers and viewers from all walks of life encounter a universal, shared experience: ‘The New Years Resolution Article’. From newspaper-perusers to doomscrollers, frequent-blog-sloggers to magazine-rack-standers, from YouTube-Short-bingers to seasoned-Reddit-clickers, they all encounter some form of the “Here is what you should make your New Year’s Resolution” article, and if the article-writer is feeling particularly sassy they might even write a “Here’s why you shouldn’t make a New Year’s Resolution this year”-type article. Rare is a truly helpful article on the subject.

In each article the reader encounters a curated list of potential resolutions — usually in a generalized topical format to apply to the largest audience base — from which they are to select one or two polished examples as the guiding principles for the new year.

The problem with this approach is that it removes the burden of thought from the reader. Make no mistake, I am a staunch proponent for removing the burden of thought (to attack the issue at hand) in many scenarios, but when it comes to self reflection and improvement this seems ill-advised. Each person encounters problems and reaches solutions in different ways, and even though we may be able to provide general solutions that apply to a wide swath of people they will never apply to everyone — that’s just Humanity at work.

This is why the act of self reflection and improvement must be a deeply personalized affair. It’s about you after-all.

I’m a little late to the game, but that’s the point.

It is already January. The tsunami of New Year’s Resolution articles has already passed, and some readers are still cleaning up the debris. Some may have already encountered defeat in their resolve. The collective hangover from the Christmas and New Year celebrations is hopefully subsiding, and a new year lays before us. Some see blue skies, bubbling brooks, chirping birds, and crisp, fresh, air — a new Skyrim playthrough. Others see a Dark Souls boss fight. Clearly their resolution lists will be different.

Perhaps it is time to look at the approach to resolutions instead of the resolutions themselves?

A System That Works For Me

Here is one approach that may help you find what you are actually looking for; progress towards a stated goal or resolution. It is the approach that my wife and I take throughout the year — not just at the onset of a new year.

This is not a list of resolutions, but a structure for setting goals, tracking them, keeping them in focus, and making it as easy as possible to stay on track. I am a fan of creating the environment that favors the outcomes I want, and this structure is a manifestation of that fact.

Here is a 30,000 foot view of our process. It may seem complicated, but it’s quite simple. Step 5, the ‘repeat as necessary’ step, can be skipped if you want, and the ultimate goal is to use a bit of foresight, and planning, and then a bit of up-front work to make the rest of the year easier for yourself. Again, our approach is to keep things low pressure, and create the environment that favors the outcome I want.

I will go into more detail on these steps further below.

Overview of Our Process:

1. Start AFTER Jan 1 — preferably over first few weeks of January
2. Review the previous year’s “Year in Review”
3. Think about goals and focuses I usually take a few days — sometimes a week
4. Set Goals and Focuses
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until you are satisfied
6. Take action — actually work towards your goals, but keep pressure low. The point is to progress, not to create more stress.

Before We Start. A Word on Goals and Focuses. What Are They?

In the process overview above, I mention goals and focuses. These have specific meanings to us.

In general, you can view goals as specific, dated, measurable, and planned. These are the bread-and-butter, get-things-done, type objectives. They are detailed and will require some initial thought on your part to flush out. I spend the bulk of my time here. REMEMBER, the idea is not to get everything right, just to think about your goal with more then just a fleeting thought. Sit down and think about what you truly want to achieve this year: Where do you want things to go? Is there something you want to change? Are you happy with the way things are going? Are there multiple steps to achieve what you want? These are all hard and intense questions, and they deserve the proper amount of time to think about them. This is the up-front work I was talking about earlier.

Focuses are general, unmeasurable, goals. This sounds unproductive, but some things are simply not measurable and trying to make them so is an exercise in futility. Accept this fact and put them into your ‘Focuses’ category. Focuses work where goals fail.

An example of this is my continual attempts to learn French. I first tried to make a goal, something like “Goal: I will do 15 minutes of DuoLingo an average 3 days per week for the entire year”. On paper it sounds good. It is measurable, is achievable, and progresses me towards my true objective of learning French. The problem was that, if I missed a day or two, got sick, or saw my average dip below that assigned metric, my stress levels started rising. This caused my to be motivated at first, “I have to catch up”, but as things piled up it started to become a downward spiral. I started to ignore the DuoLingo prompts because I was just tired of the stress.

To solve this issue, I changed it from a goal to a focus, “Focus: Year of Learning French”. I did not attach any metrics to it. I did not attach any stress. I put reminders in my phone at a time and frequency where I wouldn’t be annoyed by them — gentle reminders — to, “hey, maybe check out DuoLingo for some French”. It was low pressure and still present in my mind — just. I found that I actually did more French practice using the focus approach than the hard goal approach. I have a tendency to ‘productively procrastinate’, where I avoid doing something by doing something less important but still productive. Focuses are a perfect hack for my type of personality. When I look for something other than my current goal to do, I have a list of focuses already thought up and ready to go. The environment I have created pushes me towards my goals even when I don’t want to do them.

Here are some more specific details around how we view goals and focuses, and some examples to help guide you:

Goals Are:

• Dated: Start-date recorded as they might not all start at the same time
• Measurable: There is a measurable quality to them that can be tracked and logged
• Achievable: Make them actually achievable — realistic! You want to help yourself and your morale. This means that it fits the timeline, is within your capability, and is actually possible.
• Planned: HOW are you going to achieve the goal? List some steps that will get you from A to B. Think of this as your goal’s “business plan”. If you were to tell someone your goal, and they ask “how are you going to do that”, this is what you write/say.
• Considered within the larger framework of your goals. This means that your goals are not all extremely stressful workloads with tight deadlines.

An Example of a Goal:

• A Simple 3-Year Goal:
  • Start Date: Jan 3, 2025
  • Goal: Expand coffee roasting side gig to 50lbs sold per month
  • How:
    • Expand roasting capability: New roaster
    • Expand roasting space: Need space for new roaster and proper ventilation
    • Financing: Need to save for space first, then roaster
    • Marketing: Word of mouth and continued roasting at current levels to gain popularity
    • Product: Keep refining product to make better, take feedback from customers
  • Metric: Sell 50lbs per month for 4 months in a row

Focuses are:

• General things you want to improve that are NOT measurable
• These can be considered ‘general’ goals that will not be tracked any more than simply trying to do more of X, etc.
• There may be specific goals that relate to your focus, but the purpose of a ‘focus’ is to keep low-level pressure to move things forward without being overwhelmed. Remember, to purpose is to actually complete your goals by creating an environment that favors that outcome
• There are no goals to achieve with a focus, and so there should be little pressure to achieve anything. I use my focuses to harness my ‘productive procrastination’ tendency, and progress on something that isn’t a main goal. This also helps get yourself out of situations where your morale is hurting due to longer-term goals.
• The purpose of a focus is simply to move the ball forward in a given direction.

The motivation behind focuses is to address the tendency to get overwhelmed when I am not making any progress on any of my goals. This allows me to kick myself out of a “funk” when “stagnation” (in my mind) hits by making a little progress in my focuses. A lesson learned from 2024 is that I need to bring focuses to the forefront due to the longer term nature of my goals. Even 1-year goals are too long term in some cases and when I see little progress it starts to affect morale, which then impacts my motivation to keep going. This introduces “tiny goals” where progress is not measured, but visible.

An Example of Focuses Are:

• Focus: Learn More French – DuoLingo
• Focus: Fitness – Year of the Workout – Diet and exercise equally important
• Focus: Social – Year of the Uplift – Go for coffee more with others, work to uplift them, promote them, support them
• Focus: Personal – Year of Reading – Read more books, think on them more

Our Process: A Year in Review, Four Focuses, and the 3-2-1 Goal Structure

Finally, here is everything we do as outlined briefly above:

Step 1: This process starts AFTER Jan 1.

Reasoning: Because the Christmas and New Year celebrations distract you from actually focusing on what you want for the next year. For me, I start thinking about things in December, but I do not sit down and start writing until after Jan 1. I will not do this in one sitting: In the first weeks of January I will write some notes, think on them, then write some more later. It is important not to rush this process.

Step 2: Year in Review

A ‘Year in Review’ is simply a dated list of all the things we did this year. It can include things like major trips, cool things you did, birthday parties, I even put in every time I go for coffee with a friend. The point is to show your future self that, yes, you actually DID do something this year, and look at all the cool things they were! This becomes critical for those years where you are feeling like you did nothing at all, and the years are just passing by. It allows you to see the forgotten milestones you achieved that year

You can start small. My first Year in Review was a page long. Now it is 11 pages and counting — and that’s not because I did more, it’s because I changed what I was tracking. Going for coffee with friends is important to me, so I made a point of tracking those, and if I notice that I stopped going to coffee with someone, I make a point to have coffee with them soon.

At the beginning of a new year, we print it out (yes, all of it) and read through it. This is usually a ‘grab some champagne, make a mimosa, and read it’ type situation. We have fun with it. It doesn’t have to be champagne, it’s just supposed to be a fun, light-hearted exercise. We look forward to seeing all the things we did in the previous year, and we tend to go back and read the other “Years in Review” we saved too.

Throughout the year we update the Year in Review. I put calendar reminders throughout the year to update it (For me, Dec 28, Mar 28, Jun 28, Sept 28). My family has a shared google calendar to organize things without booking over eachother. We read through this and add the ‘interesting’ items to the Year in Review. Formatting is less important. Focus on getting the idea down and when things happened.

Save the list as a text file somewhere accessible and with all the other Years in Review. So you can update it often. So it is compatible with any platform/easily printable. So you can read through the previous years and remind yourself what you did. Printing helps us visualize things better and the paper sits around for a month or two before we recycle it. This is just a format that works for us — we like physical media, if it’s “in sight” it’s “in mind”.

This might seem like a lot of work, but it really isn’t. Set some reminders, and go through your calendar while remembering what you did. You’ll thank yourself at the end of the year when you review everything you did that year. Each year we start a new Year in Review. I put my goals and focuses at the top — what they were last year (and results), and what they are this year.

Steps 3, 4, and 5: Thinking About and Setting Goals and Focuses, and Repeat Until Satisfied

I outlined what we consider goals and focuses above. Here, we put them into a structure that works for us: The 3-2-1 goal structure with 4 focuses. It is important to reserve time to think about what you want to achieve when considering your goals. You need time! This isn’t something most people can do in a single 5-minute sitting.

The steps are broken up into “thinking about goals”, “setting the goals”, and going over what you have done again iteratively until you are happy with your goals. This usually only takes one or two passes in practice, and the “repeat” step’s purpose is to ensure that you are reviewing your goals individually as well as a whole in combination with the other goals. This prevents your ambition from getting away from you.

The overall structure is:

• Pick four “Focuses” for the year
• Use the 3-2-1 Goal structure to pick 6 goals (measurable, achievable, planned (the “how”), and metrics):
  • 3 x 1-year goals
  • 2 x 2-year goals
  • 1 x 3-year goals
• Review your goals in intervals — quarterly seems to work best for quick feedback:
  • March 31, June 30, Sept 30, Dec 31

The 3-2-1 goal structure is a method we came up with (probably with outside influences, I’m sure) to deal with the “where do you see yourself in 5 years” style questions. It has morphed over the years into a general approach to goal-setting. It is designed such that:

• You have 3 levels of goals: a 3-year, 2-year, and 1-year level
• You get one 3-year goal (“long” term), two 2-year goals (medium term), and three 1-year goals (shortest term)
• In general, at the end of each year, your 3-year goal should become a 2-year goal, and your two 2-year goals should move to 1-year. This is not always the case as You can achieve a 2-year goal in 1 year, or you can remove them if they no longer fit what you are trying to do.
• Review your goals at a regular interval and consider if they still apply to you and your life.
  • Do not fall in to a “lost cause” fallacy. If the goal does not apply anymore, get rid of it!
  • My interval is now quarterly as my situation seems to change on that interval and I can pivot my goals easier.
  • If a goal is achieved, this triggers a review of goals, and you get to pick a new goal.
  • A review’s purpose is to consider ALL of your goals and see if that is still the direction you want to go.

We have a sheet that we print out and put sticky-notes on with our goals similar to the image below. This makes it visible, easily modifiable for when we change goals or move them around, and keeps things top of mind. We try to put this in a place that we will see often — though not in direct view of visitors.

Step 6: Take Action

Inertia is the tendency for objects in motion to stay in motion and for objects at rest to stay at rest. If you are in a “rest” state, you will have to work to change to a state of “motion”. Starting out a new goal is going from a state of rest to motion, but once you get going, you will tend to stay “in motion”.

This last step seems obvious, but it can be easy to put in the mental work to select good goals and focuses, write them all down in a nice new structure, and then put them in a drawer and forget about them.

Again, my approach is to make the environment help me achieve what I want — make it favor the desired outcome — so putting the goals in a drawer does not make things easier with respect to achieving your goals. If anything, a year will go by, you will open that drawer, see the forgotten goals, and feel more stress.

Put the goals in a place you will see them (preferably every day). Make it easy for yourself to take action. If your goal is to drink more water, put a glass or bottle of water next to your bed, or on the counter where you make breakfast. If you want to read more, place books where you generally have time to read and remove distractions from those areas. Use your phone’s calendar and reminders to kindly (and not so frequently) prompt a forgotten action. If you have ambitious goals, try breaking them up into mini-goals — bite-sized pieces. Don’t be afraid to try new things and dump things if they aren’t working.

The idea is motion. Action. Progress. It doesn’t matter how much ultimately. Only that you are further than when you started a year ago. Even if you aren’t, that’s OK. In all my years doing this approach, I have never achieved 100% of my goals. They are all a “work in progress”.

Be kind to yourself.