Often these consist of a promise to stop existing bad habits or of avoiding new ones. No matter what the time of year, setting new goals for improvement in different areas of our lives, rather than promising simply to stop doing unproductive things, would seem to have a better chance of attainment. Facts point out, however, that only a few short weeks or perhaps even days after making resolutions or promises, many of us have already come up with a multitude of excuses as to why we can't live up to them. Because of this latter fact, let's take a good look at the act of making excuses in general. What we have here isn't simple procrastination.
Excuses come in the form of out and out rationalization or denial of responsibility.
Those special projects we were going to work on would be done, if only we weren't so tired after a day's work at the factory. This same tiredness doesn't seem to affect other areas of our life such as Sunday night bowling. Let's take bowling for another example. Research into the world of excuse making, can be very enlightning. It seems there are many different strategies involved in this explanation of, or preparation for, failure.