How to Make Good New Year’s Resolutions

New Year’s is a great time to really take a look at your life and take the necessary steps to get closer to your goals. Some say that New Year’s resolutions are a waste of time, since many people forget about their resolutions in a couple of weeks and fall back to their old habits.

But just because some people fail, doesn’t mean you can’t succeed. If you want to upgrade your life and make your dreams a reality, you have to plan smart and follow the steps you have set for yourself. In this post, I make some suggestions on what you should consider when making resolutions and I give you a couple of tips on how to stick to them.

1. Be clear about your most important goals in life

First of all, you have to be clear about what are your goals in life. If you want to be a successful lawyer one day or live in Spain, what can you do this year to get closer to your goals? If you have been thinking about losing weight, what exactly is your primary purpose to lose weight? Do you want to be healthy? Do you want to like what you see in the mirror more?

Maybe your first goal should be to find the joy in exercise or get clothes that fit your body and style better. It’s easy to come up with general goals, but it’s important to concentrate on goals that reflect what you actually want to have in life.

2. What can you realistically do this year

Every New Year I get super excited about the next year and come up with a dozen resolutions, as if I had all the time in my hands to reach all my big and small goals at once. But let’s face it, we do have to spend the majority of our time at work or studying, sleeping, and taking care of our daily responsibilities. That leaves us with a limited amount of time.

Think carefully about how much time you can commit to your big goals that take time, such as exercising several times a week or learning a new language. If you calculate that you can commit 4 hours a week to learning Spanish, you can plan your time wisely and make a lot of progress in what seems like a small amount of time.

You have to also be a bit lenient with yourself. If you have really big goals for your future, keep in mind that the next year is only one year among many. You don’t have to achieve everything this year, but you should lay a solid groundwork for your future.

3. What small things help you reach your bigger goals

It is always important to break down your big goals into smaller, actionable steps. If you want to be healthier, what can that mean in your everyday life? Possibly flossing every night, making green smoothies when you come home in the afternoon, or only eating fast food twice a month.

If you dream of being fluent in Spanish, perhaps you should start by learning the 1000 most common words first or committing to watching one episode of a Spanish tv show every night.

A good actionable step is something that you know you can do, but that sometimes requires you to push yourself a little. You have to step outside your comfort zone to grow, but if you go too far, you might get discouraged and fall back to your old habits.

4. What are the most important things for you to do to level up

Do you want to level up? I’m sure you have a long list of things you’d like to achieve or get or change about your life. If your list is long, you have to prioritize. Think about what are the things that will most contribute to your growth.

What are you able to do now? What is long overdue? Is there something that actually wouldn’t bring much additional value to your life?

Try to identify the things that would benefit you most on your way to reaching your goals in the next few years. If you are looking to have a certain kind of a career, maybe an internship or volunteer work would really help you forward. If you want to overcome shyness, you might want to start a new hobby this year or decide to talk more in group projects or meetings.

Or maybe the most important thing for you to learn this year is to learn to go to sleep early or to stop procrastinating.

After you’ve made your resolutions, you want to make sure that you are able to fulfill them. Here are my tips on how to make the most of your resolutions and succeed:

1. Have precise and clear resolutions

If your resolutions are not clear, you’re more likely to fail or not even start. You need to be clear about what exactly you are asking from yourself. “Studying Spanish” doesn’t mean much, but “spending 30 minutes on Mondays to review Spanish words on Anki” does.

It might also be a good idea to create an individual plan for each month, in case your resolution is more complex than flossing every night. If you want to exercise more or find a better job, you’ll likely have to adjust your plan as you move along. The important thing is to always be clear about what you should do next.

2. Have a way to track your progress

Learning new habits and skills requires constant effort. Make sure to choose some way to track your progress. You can download a habit-tracking app or have a chart on your wall. If your goal is not something that you need to work on daily, but for instance a bigger project like finding a job, you can still benefit from tracking your progress.

Finding a job requires a lot of work, like polishing your resume and LinkedIn page, drafting and sending applications, searching for new companies to apply to, and brushing up your interview skills.

You can track how much you’re getting done on a weekly basis or how many applications you’ve sent already. Being able to see how much you have done already is very encouraging and keeps you going.

3. Create cues

It’s easy to forget about the habits you’re trying to create if there is nothing reminding you of them. A cue is anything that triggers the new habit. It’s easy to come up with cues for simple habits like flossing or drinking more water. You can for example place floss on your nightstand or place a water pitcher in the kitchen to always drink a glass of water when you walk in.

After a while, walking in the kitchen immediately makes you think of drinking water and it is easy to follow the habit. If your goal this year is to learn a new language, you can leave your notes or flashcards where you eat breakfast, so that you can do some revision while eating.

4. Reward yourself

The road to success is long and often your goals can seem a hundred miles away. It’s a good idea to encourage yourself a little by celebrating your little achievements. Try to come up with little rewards that give you some energy when you don’t feel like continuing but are not too big so that they still match your achievements.

You can for example have one cheat meal at the end of a week of healthy eating, get a set of new highlighters for doing well in an exam, or get extra free time after sending a certain number of job applications. I myself like to reward myself mostly with free time since that’s what I crave the most these days.

Time to start changing your life!

I hope this post helped you in making good New Year’s resolutions for the coming year. Have you made any resolutions for the next year? Share them down below!

If you need ideas on what resolutions to make, read this post next:

20 Truly Useful New Year’s Resolution Ideas