Resolutions and Incremental Change

A couple years ago I asked several of my friends to give me New Year’s resolutions. This led me to me reading more poetry than I ever had before (none of which I remember), focusing on home decor (I got some art I really enjoy), reading a book recommended by a different friend every month (I found three keepers), keeping inspiring quotes around my room (thanks, Machiavelli), and a few other things. I can’t recommend others do this. The main thing I learned was who to not ask for book recommendations. Yes, I did things I wouldn’t have done otherwise and I can’t say I feel more complete from doing so.

I have a whiteboard on the door in my bedroom. I have used it for a number of things. For a while I would go to it first thing in the morning and write down what I wanted to get done that day. This would eventually snowball into a large stressful list as I would have greater ambitions day after day that kept carrying over. This use was good when I was crushing my objectives and it was a stressful spotlight on my ambitions when I fell behind.

Seeing that a year is too long and a day is too short, I have been experimenting with monthly goals since September. This has been a definite improvement. At the end of each month I’d reflect on my priorities to figure out what would be best for me to have done by the end of the following month. While the month time frame is better it still falls prey to me making lists of things to do that distract me from the things that are most important and most stressful.

Figuring out what is most important to focus on can be challenging. The most common tell for what is most important for me is to find the thing that is stressing me out the most. I think this is the case because if something isn’t stressful then it is something that is already under control or understood (not always, just most often). The thing causing the stress is literally outside of my comfort zone and I have to leave that safe space if I want to go and get the treasure. The farther I have to go in one trip the harder it is to succeed.

Incremental improvement towards a known objective is typically the way to roll. Go a little outside the comfort zone. Expand my comfort zone. Repeat.

I used to hate doing pull ups. It’s a tricky movement because, unless you have done them for a while, you probably can’t do many. If you can do three max it can be tough to make a workout from them that doesn’t annihilate your willpower because every set is a max set. When I decided to start doing pull ups until I loved doing pull ups I was able to do seven max. I started by doing five sets of three with a three minute rest and I did this almost every day. I was never that sore. I always left the bar knowing I could do more. I also never left the bar hating what I was doing. A year and a couple months later I now do twenty sets of five with a forty second rest period three days in a row followed by a rest day. I truly love pull ups. I maxed out a few days ago (I did 20) and I still hate it.

It seems the key to retention for doing a new thing is to maximize the upside while minimizing the downside.

I know, obvious statement of 2019 goes to me.

Designing a practice that does this can be challenging. Hell, taking a moment to figure out what the real upsides and actual downsides are can take time. I thought I hated pull ups, turns out I hated maxing out and it took me a year of doing pull ups to realize this. I could have all of the benefits of pull ups without the downside. I just couldn’t minimize the downside because I didn’t know what it really was. I repeatedly augmented the pull ups to make them harder and none of those changes lasted other than shaving off individual seconds of rest time (seriously, one at a time).

For whatever your ambitions are for 2020 I’d encourage you to take the extra time to reflect on your objectives. What exactly are you hoping to do, achieve, be, or experience? What things are likely going to slow you down? In what ways are the things you want to do similar to other things you’ve tried that have failed? What can you learn from those past attempts that can help you this time? Is your objective too large and doomed to failure from the get go?

I use the app HabitHub to track change I want to make and I love it. Here it is on Android and iPhone, I think it costs $4 to unlock everything. It’s a simple app that allows you to write down a habit and track it each day with done, skipped, or failed. You can add individual notes for each day. It also has a great widget which allows you to scroll through and use it from your home screen. I use it to keep track of things I want to do every day such as read, journal and meditate. I use it to remind myself to stretch or take supplements. I use it to track my workouts, what I lifted on which day and so on. Having everything visualized helps me stay on the path and do the small, incremental work that helps me be who I want to be.

If you want to take a deep dive into how to deliberately form a new habit or release one that no longer serves you read this book, Atomic Habits. I’ve read several books on the subject and this one is the new king as of 2019.

Honestly, I’m not a fan of New Year’s resolutions. I appreciate the intention that people approach it with, that’s wonderful. And, I think every day is worthy of it’s own renewed commitment to being who we want to be (really, any moment of awareness is). While we move into a new decade consider living by design instead of default. Each moment, each day, each week, choose who you want to be and how you want to respond. The number of opportunities we have to do so is literally finite, we may as well start making a habit of making deliberate change now.