Don’t Make New Year’s Resolutions — Make New Month’s Resolutions Instead
By: Djaro Donk
Tags: Planning, Goals, Self Improvement, New Year Resolution

Don’t Make New Year’s Resolutions — Make New Month’s Resolutions Instead

Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash

Years are very long. They might not appear long — to me, 2020 feels like it has just begun, and it’s almost over already — but they absolutely are. If you don’t spend all your time playing video games, watching series, browsing social media or any other type of mindless consumption, it’s amazing how much you can discover, learn, and improve in a year. This means your future self will have way more knowledge than you. The question then becomes:

How can you set a goal that the more knowledgeable future you will certainly want to reach?

The short answer: you can’t. You never know what will happen, especially if you’re self-employed. One year ago my new year’s resolution was to create a YouTube channel, but somewhere down the line, I discovered that I just liked writing the scripts, not producing the videos themselves, so I switched to writing. This is not something I could have predicted last year. One year ago my new year’s resolution was to draw more, but after a few months of drawing, I came to the conclusion that while I liked the idea of drawing, I did not actually enjoy drawing. That’s something that I couldn’t have predicted.

Because life is unpredictable and ever-changing, it does not make sense to decide now what your goals will be 12 months from now. It’s fine to have long-term goals but remember that they may change and that that’s okay so you don’t end up imprisoned by your past aspirations.

I’ve tried to get back into drawing again many, many times because I felt like I was letting down my past self until I finally realised that my past self would not have wanted me to draw had he known what I know now.

The solution to this is to create new month’s resolutions instead of new year’s resolutions.

Months are short; short enough that you’re able (probably) to plan one month into the future. New month’s resolutions, because a month is so short, can dynamically change depending on what’s going on in your life. If you encounter a new opportunity, it will take at most 30 days until it is integrated into your plan, probably less. It seems, at least to me, that new month’s resolutions are superior in every way to new year’s resolutions.

But how do you create those new month’s resolutions? It’s quite simple, do what you would do to create a new year’s resolution but one-twelfth the size. That is self-evident, but here are some things to keep in mind:

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

Write down your new month’s resolutions.

This goes without saying. Your memory is fickle and prone to failure and anything which is stored only in your memory might not be stored at all. You will end up misremembering or forgetting goals so you won’t be able to tell if you reached them. Writing your goals down is especially important when you have a lot of small goals, as one tiny goal can quickly slip out of your mind never to be seen again. Write them down in a notebook, jot them down on a piece of paper, type them into your computer, it doesn’t matter how you store them as long as you store them.

Don’t underestimate yourself.

A day has 24 hours. If 8 of those are spent sleeping and 8 of those are spent working, that leaves you with 8 free hours every day. This means you have 240 free hours every month. One hour is just 0.42% of your free time every month. Take what you can do in a single hour and multiply it by 200. You can do all of that in a single month and still have ample time left.

Don’t micromanage your future self.

You don’t have all the information. You will find out new things about what it is that you’re doing while doing it. You don’t know exactly how long everything will take. It is better to have a few overarching goals and figure out the nitty-gritty on the go than it is to try to plan everything into the finest detail and inevitably fail.

Have a weekly moment of self-reflection.

Having a weekly moment where you look back at your week and reflect on what you did is good advice in general, not just for creating new month’s resolutions. However, the two can easily be integrated. At the end of every week, read through your goals and tick off those that you have completed. That'll let you know whether you’re on, ahead of or behind on schedule. This also makes it very obvious what goals were easy to reach and what goals took more time than expected, which is information you can use to improve your future new month’s resolutions.