To get our resolutions right, we need to make it a group project.
There is no better time for New Year’s Day to fall than on a Sunday. It’s the first day of the week. The calendar lines up perfectly!
Except, of course, that it’s Sunday, and who is motivated to start on Sunday? So, we’re just going to plan on starting tomorrow. What’s the harm?
But…then it’s not the whole year. So maybe it would be better if New Year’s Day was on a Monday? Then we could kick it off right!
Except, of course, that we stayed up late to ring in the New Year and kiss somebody. Getting up early to start those fitness goals before work, well, that seems less than optimal.
It really sounds like the only time New Year’s Day can fall is on a Saturday. That way we can sleep in and yet somehow still get up early. Or something else impossible.
New Year Resolutions are problematic.
We fail at them. Every time. Unless we figure out how to actually do them. And even then, it’s a whole thing.
The thing about resolutions is that they represent hope. Like salvation from our own bad habits. Or, for those Type A personalities, an (often neurotic) opportunity to get better.
Resolutions themselves are, at best, a fit of optimism at a time when we need it most.
The concept is solid. Our execution is lacking.
Our execution. Not my execution or yours. Not the guy who quit smoking that one day because he felt like it. Or that chick who lost 100 pounds by willpower alone. The stories are plentiful, and yet not anything close to average.
I mean our execution of resolutions. Because we make it about will power. Instead of, say, our common dysfunction.
If we all resolve to eat better and lose weight this year, at what point do we acknowledge this isn’t a me problem?
Virtually all resolutions are individualistic.
They rely on the idea that I have a problem that only I can solve. Which is often less true than we think.
Most productivity experts will remind us that resolutions made in community or with accountability partners are significantly more likely to stick. If you have somebody helping keep you to it, you’ll do it.
But even this itself relies on a person individually doing the work of initiating the change. Which, again, is totally fair if we didn’t find the “problems” are so common.
Helping others is the ultimate resolution “hack”
We can short circuit our individualistic impulse by making resolutions more public. And I don’t mean our own. Nor does it involve finding the right group. It just means making this stuff more communal.
Just start showing up at the gym with the friend who is resolving to lose weight. Make lunch to share with the one who plans to eat out less. Or find a team of people who will walk with you.
If we make the resolving more social, we help each other.
One level deeper.
Resolutions remind us that the true problem is individualizing a common problem.
We fail to lost weight because eating well and staying active is increasingly niche for most Americans. We have to choose to eat better. Not because we don’t have the option to. But that it is ever easier and less expensive to not.
Our lifestyle norms aren’t oriented toward health. So resolving to be healthy is swimming upstream.
Working together, we can make the swimming easier for the people around us. But if we also work at the deeper level, we can change the current.