What We're Reading Now

Resolve to Change for Just One Month

12 January 2016

Allison read How to Stick to Your New Year’s Resolutions by Austin Frakt and appreciated an economist’s very practical approach to achieving New Year’s resolutions (or any goal that matters to you).

Tags: allison read, balance, change, new year’s resolutions

We’re 12 days into January, and many people I know are in the midst of working on their New Year’s resolutions. I think I may know just as many people whose resolution is to never make New Year’s resolutions. However, even within that group, I know they periodically want to make a change in their lives and need to set some goals to do so. Regardless of where you fall on the resolve or not to resolve continuum, I’m hopeful today’s post might be useful to you whenever you want to make a change.

According to his blog, The Incidental Economist, Austin Frakt is “a health economist and researcher; the creator, co-manager, and a primary author of The Incidental Economist; and a regular contributor to The New York Times’ The Upshot.” The New York Times introduced a recent post of his by saying, “We have always been impressed by how much Austin Frakt gets done. In September last year, he wrote a memorable article for his blog,        The Incidental Economist, about how he does it. (We highly recommend it.) So we asked him for advice on sticking to a resolution. As we expected, he came up with a method that others may find useful.”

After reading, How to Stick to Your New Year’s Resolutions, I also found myself thinking, “others may find this useful.” Frakt breaks down the resolution (goal-setting process) into a pretty simple formula by suggesting you start by asking, “Why don’t I do this already?” and “Why do I feel the need to do this now?” “The first question is practical; it seeks the barrier. The second is emotional; it seeks the motivation necessary to sustain an effort to remove the barrier.”

After answering these two questions, he suggests making a specific plan for change, but then only committing to the change for one month. You’ll find this one-month experiment in a lot of the change management and goal-setting literature, but somehow Frakt presents the concept in a way that I think feels a bit more straightforward, practical, and efficient. (His post is only 804 words long so that helps, too.)

Frakt gives three examples of how a “time-limited commitment” helped him make two important changes in his life and decide that a third change was too disruptive. He also explains his next resolution for this year.

With Frakt’s advice in mind, I’m thinking about the four goals I have for myself this year. I haven’t quite figured out how I’m applying his advice to three of them, but I know how I want to use his approach for one of them. I’ve blogged every Tuesday except for vacations since 29 May 2012. This was a difficult habit for me to create, but it’s definitely ingrained now and getting easier for me every week. This year, I’d like to blog by 12:00pm on Tuesdays.

“Why don’t I do this already?” Having a rule like this for myself on the same day every week was a pretty big deal for me for the last 186 posts. All I’ve felt capable of so far is committing to being done by midnight. I like as much flexibility as possible when it comes to achieving something I don’t always feel like doing so the midnight deadline gave me a full day to get it done.

“Why do I feel the need to do this now?” I’ve noticed that on Tuesdays when I finish my post earlier that I feel better about not just the rest of my day, but the rest of my week. I think I might get more done in general if I find a way to not let the task weigh on me for as long as it does on some Tuesdays. I also know that I’m a better writer earlier in the day.

Rather than commit to this resolution for the whole year, I’m just committing to the next four Tuesdays, and then I’ll evaluate my experiment. To get started I’m going to do my best to protect Tuesday mornings from meetings. That’s not always possible so on the Tuesdays when I must have a meeting, I’m committing to waking up even earlier.

You might be thinking, “Why not just write on Monday afternoons?” I may try that after my one-month experiment, but mostly I like to dedicate my Mondays to other things, and I’m interested in experimenting with what it’s like to have one morning a week without meetings when I commit to being done with one of my hardest tasks of the week by noon.

How would your resolution or goal-setting process be different if you only committed to making a change for one-month?

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