Goals and Resolutions

because it's a new year

Have you ever made a New Year’s resolution?

A new year feels like a fresh start. Many people commit to being more virtuous, or exercising consistently, or saving money, or anything else that might improve them. However, it’s no secret that most of these resolutions are forgotten within the first few months or even weeks of the year.

Does that mean we shouldn’t make resolutions or goals for the new year? No, of course not. Whether it’s at the start of a new year, beginning of a month or week, or a random Tuesday in the middle of May, goals and resolutions are important if you want to improve yourself and your life. Maybe our goals should just be a little SMARTer.

I first learned about SMART goals in a December Praxis workshop. SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound goals.

Specific

Let’s say that you want to get more sleep. If you just say “I resolve to get more sleep this year”, then chances are that you’ll either forget about the goal or achieve it in a counterproductive way.

The first thing you need to do is make your goal more specific. Do you want to go to bed earlier or sleep in later? Do you want to stop bad habits before bed?

How about we expand that initial “sleep more” goal to:

“I want to stop being on my phone before bed and go to bed earlier so I get more sleep this year.”

Measurable

The next step to having a SMART goal is being able to measure it. Without markers of your progress, who’s to say whether or not you’ve improved at all? How much earlier do you want to go to bed? What time do you plan to stop checking your phone? We can adjust our example goal (or resolution) as follows:

“I want to put away my phone by 9:30pm and be in bed by 10:30 so that I can get more sleep this year.”

This way, you can clearly tell whether or not you’ve met your goal that day. There’s no doubt that you’re not improving, nor room to lie to yourself about improvements that aren’t really there.

Achievable

But new habits are notoriously difficult to form. It’s easy to say that you’ll do something every day, and then do it for 4 or 5 days, and then skip a day, and then another, and then you’re just too tired, or too busy… and before you know it, your shiny new resolution is gathering dust in the attic.

That’s why resolutions have to be achievable. If you’re used to scrolling for two hours before falling asleep at 1am, are you really going to be able to switch to 10:30pm bedtimes just like that? Probably not. What if you work up—that is, down—to it instead? Say that you first commit to going to bed no later than midnight , and then slowly move towards your desired 10:30?

Or maybe you can make that two-and-a-half hour jump, just not every night. In that case, you could try to initially hit your goal three times a week. Like the other example, you can then work up to only staying up for special occasions. (Like the New Year’s Eve twelve months from now!)

To make our sleep goal more achievable, let’s modify it some more:

“I want to put away my phone by 9:30pm and be in bed by 10:30 at least three nights a week for the next month. Then I’ll work up to doing this every day so that I can have better sleeping habits by the end of the year.”

Relevant

Another important aspects of goal setting is making sure that every part of that goal is relevant. It wouldn’t make sense to add a healthier diet into your sleep goal.

What about the phone part of our goal? In this example, it’s necessary if using your phone is going to prevent you from going to bed on time. But if that’s not something relevant to your sleeping habits, don’t include it.

For our example, let’s say it’s not.

“I want to be in bed by 10:30 at least three nights a week for the next month. Then I’ll work up to doing this every day so that I can have better sleeping habits by the end of the year.”

Time-bound

In the case of New Years resolutions, a time-frame is already built in: one year. But if you’re creating other goals, or trying to form habits, then it’s necessary to clarify that.

If you don’t add a starting date, then you can push it back as far as you like, always telling yourself that you’ll get to it later. Keeping all that in mind, let’s make some final modifications to our sleep example:

“This year, my goal is to form a habit of putting my phone away by 9:30pm and being in bed by 10:30. I’ll start on January 2nd by going to bed no later than midnight for a month, and then push that time back by a half hour every subsequent month.”

This resolution is a lot longer than the original “I resolve to get more sleep this year”, but it’s also a lot SMARTer. I found this strategy helpful for setting my own goals, and I hope it will be beneficial for you as well.

All that being said, here are two of my SMART goals for 2025:

“In 2025, I want to learn to control and improve my emotions. Since I don’t know how to go about with this, I’ll start by tracking habits that affect my moods. I will so daily in a Google spreadsheet, with the initial intent to only observe and not change these habits. As time goes on, I will implement other goals based on my observations.”

“I want to self-publish my second poetry collection by the end of this year. I will strive to write two poems a week until I have enough. During this time, I will research better places to self-publish, collaborate with an artist on a cover, and build my audience on various platforms to promote the book better once it’s ready.”

Did you make goals or resolutions for the New Year? I'd love to hear what they are!

With perpetual lack of a clever sign-off,
Avelia A. Shindyapin