Why are so many new year’s resolutions hard to keep?

They’re not clearly defined: If you resolve simply to exercise more or eat better, it’s hard to measure whether you’ve achieved that goal for any particular day or week.

They’re unrealistic: Our goals are born from our desires, but the actions required to achieve them have to be adjusted to the context and commitments in our lives. It’s all very well to resolve to write for two hours a day, but if you don’t actually have the time in your schedule for that, you will only wind up frustrated.

They need support: If you have ambitious goals, then planning how to reach them may not be enough. You need someone to support you in taking action — whether that’s a friend who will cheer you up when you feel discouraged, a coach who will hold you accountable for your actions, or a family member who joins you in your endeavor.

Here’s some good news

It’s still the new year. If you’re reading this post on January 31, only 8.7% of the year has gone by. That’s actually not very much. To reframe that amount: if you apply the same percentage to waking minutes in the day, estimating a day with 15 waking hours, you come up with 78 minutes.

In other words, if you woke up at 6:00 am, at 7:20 am, would you feel that the day was too far along to start something new?

Probably not. So apply the same thinking to 2013 and focus on how many new possibilities still lie ahead this year.

You can start doing something new any day. The start of the year, the first of the month, or Monday mornings may serve as external markers of something new, markers that are shared by many people. But if those don’t work for you, then go ahead and choose to do something differently right now, no matter what day it is.

Try a Five-Day Experiment

If you have a goal you’d like to move forward on this year, try this method to help you get into action:

• Pick a specific, small action you can do each day that will help you move forward on this goal. If you’re feeling discouraged or stuck around this goal, pick a very small action to make sure it’s realistic.
• Decide when each day for the next five days that you will take this action.
• Tell a friend, coach, or other accountability partner what you plan to do.
• Track your progress: put a star on your calendar each day that you take action or email your accountability partner with your successes.

Why five days? Because you can imagine the next five days. You probably have a pretty good idea of what you’ll be doing and how you could make time to take action on your important goal.

Once you’ve successfully taken action for those five days, you’ll have gained some momentum and also some awareness. Maybe you’ll learn that Wednesday mornings are not a good day to go to the gym, or that writing in the evening is better for your creativity. Then, use whatever you’ve learned about yourself and your goal to design your action plan for the next five days!

And yet, many of us also pay more attention to some days than others: the start or end of a month; the solstice or the beginning of a new season; the beginning of a new academic semester; and our birthday tend to be days that prompt reflection and the setting of new intentions.

Because so many people use the start of a new calendar year to set goals and make plans for the future, there’s a strong energy around intentions right now. You may also encounter its opposite — a kind of resistance or cynicism about resolutions or goal-setting that often arises from trying to force change that isn’t really what you deeply desire.

If you want to use this time of year for reflection and planning, here are three different sets of questions that can be helpful. Choose the set that speaks to you  — some of us prefer to think in concrete specific details, and others prefer to imagine the big picture. Or you can try your hand at all three.

Keep in mind — if you find a set of questions that are useful, you don’t have to wait until the next January to use them again.  They are helpful for checking in with yourself on a quarterly or monthly basis, too.

Set A

•  What accomplishments, experiences, and events were most important to you in 2012? List at least 5 in each category.
• What would you most like to do in 2013?
• Where would you like to go?
• Who would you like to connect with?

Set B

• When you think about the past year, what themes seem most important?
• Who have you been this year?  Who would you like to be next year?
• What personal qualities would you like to strengthen next year?
• What three key words capture the essence of what’s important to you for 2013?

Set C

• What do you want to leave behind you or let go of?
• What do you want more of in the year ahead?

Set Your Intentions

After you’ve spent time reflecting on some of these questions, try writing out 4-5 intentions for the year ahead, phrased in the present tense.  For example, one of my personal intentions is to focus on my health, which I phrased as “I take good care of my physical well-being.”  Setting that intention encourages me to ask each day how I might put it into practice.  Some days that might mean going for a run; other days it might mean taking a nap.  Right now, on December 31st, I can’t anticipate which days in the new year will require which specific activities to support that intention. But I know it’s important to me.

Phrasing these intentions in the present tense means that each time you read one, you’re saying it inside your mind (or even aloud) and helping bring it into reality.  Writing out your 4-5 intentions on an index card, or posting them on your computer desktop where you’ll see them each day helps bring them into focus and make them useful far beyond the first week of the year.

When someone asks you in January “How was your break?” I want you to be able to honestly say “it was great!”

But that doesn’t happen without some thoughtful reflection and planning. So I’ve completely revised and updated the Great Winter Break Workbook — a free PDF workbook with questions for reflection and action-planning exercises.

By clearly defining what great means for you this winter break, you can make it happen.

Before and After 30 Days of Meditation

Maria Popova, who curates Brainpickings, recently posted a link to an article about “Before and After,” a series of images by New York photographer Peter Seidler. Seidler took photographs of participants on the first and last days of a month-long meditation retreat, while asking them to think about their expectations and their experience at the retreat.

The structure of these paired images invites the viewer to look for differences between them. More than that, the “Before and After” structure so familiar to us from advertising invites us to see positive changes that can be attributed to some process or product. Seidler’s notes on the project conclude with an assertion about what he sees in the series, and an invitation to the viewer:

It’s clear from results that the person in every one of the portraits has undergone an important transformative experience. I leave it to the viewer to draw their own conclusion.

Although most comments and reviews have been very positive, some viewers have criticized the series as potentially manipulated. I think this is a response to the proliferation of such photos in advertising for diet and fitness products, which many consumers recognize as sometimes making exaggerated or unsubstantiated claims. Images can always be manipulated, and there are many ways to create the illusion of an intended effect.

But as far as I can tell, Seidler isn’t selling anything with these photos. He’s selling the photos themselves, since he’s an artist. There’s little reason to imagine why he would go to the trouble of staging or falsifying these images, which are part of a larger project on contemplation. Moreover, regular practitioners of meditation often notice physical transformations that result from greater muscle relaxation and the calming of the nervous system.

Documenting Your Before

One of the things I find so compelling about Seidler’s project is that I can imagine these photos serving as a reinforcement of the effects of the meditation retreat for its participants. No one goes to a 30 day retreat by accident, after all. These people had hopes or intentions for the event. These photographs serve as a record of who they were when they began the month-long retreat.

Setting aside a little time to explore your starting point can boost your motivation to make a change and add to the richness of your change process. Consider, for example, these questions:

• how do you feel right now?
• how happy are you right now?
• how much energy do you have right now?

How to best document your own starting point for a personal change depends upon what kind of change it is and what your comfortable modes for learning and creating are. Some possibilities include:

• write a short (one paragraph or one page) description of how you feel right now and why you’re undertaking the change
• taking a photograph of yourself at the beginning of the change, and/or throughout the change process
• brainstorming a list of keywords that describe your current state
• drawing or creating a collage of images that evoke your current state
• write a letter or an email to your future self that describes how you feel right now
• leave yourself a voicemail and save it in your phone

Set a Clear Timeframe

“Before” gives meaning to our “after” when we have a clearly defined timeframe. Setting a timeframe helps you measure the success of the change. For example, say I decide to start taking a new B-vitamin supplement every morning. If I don’t decide upon a timeframe with which to evaluate the effects of the new vitamin, how will I know how well it’s working? By writing some notes about my current energy levels and my reasons for embarking upon the new vitamin regimen and setting a 30-day time period for my change process, I’ve given myself a clear structure that will help me evaluate whether or not this is a change I want to stick with.

The latter requires many more steps. Sure, eating an apple might involve a trip to the market if you don’t have any on hand. But if you had a pumpkin and an apple sitting on your kitchen counter in front of you, you could simply pick up the apple and bite into it. But a pumpkin has to be cut, cored, or chopped; baked, boiled, or steamed; and usually mixed, mashed, or seasoned.

In other words, eating a pumpkin is a project — something that requires more than one step to accomplish or complete. Eating an apple is, if it’s in front of you, a simple action. (I’m using David Allen’s helpful distinction between projects and actions from his book, Getting Things Done.)

Understanding the difference between projects and actions, and applying that knowledge to your to-do list, can help you gain clarity and break through procrastination or resistance.

You can’t just do a project. You can only do one step of it at a time. Your brain knows this. So if you have written “eat pumpkin” on your to-do list for tomorrow, every time you look over your list, some part of your brain freaks out a little bit. When we feel unsure or confused about how to proceed with something, we tend to put it off.

Many things we procrastinate about are, in fact, projects in disguise as actions. When you break a project down into its constituent steps, that task you’d been putting off or dreading suddenly seems a lot more manageable. I can’t “eat pumpkin,” but I can “look at recipes for vegan pumpkin pie in my three favorite cookbooks” as a starting point.

Here’s how to write a better to-do list that focuses on actions:

1. Start each item with a verb. Nouns by themselves like “garage door” tend to gesture at projects that could be broken down into steps. Even if “garage door” is meaningful to me today, it might not be five days from now. Writing your action list with clear verbs makes it easier to identify and group tasks later on. “Buy 9-volt battery for the garage door opener” clearly states what I need to do and lets me easily take care of it when I’m doing other errands.

2. Include measurable specifics, such as amounts, duration, or location, so that you have a clear way of knowing what the action consists of and when you’ve accomplished it. “Write for 30 minutes” or “write 3 paragraphs” are measurable actions. “Write a great American novel” is a project.

3. If you feel stuck or unsure about something, try breaking it down into smaller steps, even micro-steps. If writing for 30 minutes seems too difficult, try writing for 5 minutes. Or start with the micro-step of turning on your computer, or gathering your pen and notebook.

Unmasking the projects that might be hiding in your to-do list and rewriting them as specific actions frees up your energy for creating, building, thinking, and growing — taking action and moving forward.

Some people are sharpest in the morning and dim in the afternoon; others muddle through the first hours of the day and only hit their stride later on. There is no inherent value to one time of day over another. In recent decades, online communication has expanded the potential times of day when we can work, shop, play, and do business. In order to take best advantage of that flexibility, you have to figure out what your best time of day is for your different tasks and priorities.

Identify your constraints

What parts of your schedule are limited or fixed by other people, institutions, or obligations? If you need to get your children ready for school and get them there on time each day, that will constrain your flexibility. You may work in an office environment with set hours, need to catch a commuter train, or teach classes at specific times.

Identify where you have choice

When and how during the day do you get to choose how you spend your time? For instance, if you are in the office from 8-6, do you have choices about which project or kind of work you do when? Even within the larger time constraints of professional and personal obligations, most people have more choices available to them than they are aware of. Writing in the morning might work well for your friend or colleague, but maybe you’d rather take care of administrative tasks then and write in the afternoon. Whenever you have a choice in what you do when, you have the opportunity to explore how well what you’re doing is working and how well a change might suit you.

Discover how you feel at different times of the day

Many people have a general sense of themselves as preferring mornings or evenings, perhaps identifying with labels like “night owl” or knowing that they often feel sleepy in the afternoon. But discovering your personal time patterns means thinking not just about how awake you feel, but also how you function on a number of different levels:

• when are you most alert and engaged?
• when are you physically most energetic?
• when are you most creative?
• when are you best at analytical tasks?
• when are you most in tune with your emotions?
• when are you best at absorbing or taking in ideas or information?
• when are you best at creating or developing ideas or information?

If you’re interested in exploring these questions, just observe yourself over the next week or two and make some notes. Set a reminder alarm on your phone or computer to ring every couple of hours. When it chimes, ask yourself: “How do I feel right now? What energies are strongest? What energies are weakest?” If you wait until the end of the day to make some notes, chances are that you won’t really remember how you felt at 1:30, or how it was different from how you felt at 9:00 am. You can also use email services like Nudgemail or Ask Me Every to send you email questions at preset times, or Oh Don’t Forget to send yourself text messages. Just bring some gentle curiosity to the process.

Personally speaking
Doing this exercise has helped me understand my own natural rhythms and preferences so that I can match them to the activities I want to do. Certain kinds of writing I like to do early in the day, when I’m more creative, but I absorb information from reading best in the afternoon. When you can’t match your activities to your natural tendencies, being aware of that can help you adjust your sleep, diet, or activity levels accordingly. For instance, if I need to interact with a lot of people early in the day, I need to prepare myself for that with some vigorous exercise.

Your best time
Your patterns may not be immediately apparent, but returning to these exploration questions over time will help you understand how you can match your activities to your energy levels. The best time of day to do anything is whenever is best for you.

Know what your strengths are
Of course, Olympic-level athletes possess tremendous natural capabilities, but that alone isn’t enough. First, their natural skills or physical tendencies are matched to particular sports, which you can see so clearly as the evening’s television coverage of the Games moves from, say, gymnastics to swimming. Different people are naturally going to have different gifts, whether we’re talking about sports, academics, or the world of business. Figuring out what your natural strengths are and matching them to your chosen activities and goals will generally bring you more satisfaction and achievement than you will find working against your strengths.

Do you like to interact with people? Are you detail-oriented or are you better at seeing the big picture? Do you prefer to work with your hands or with your words? How important is financial gain to you? Working with these and other questions about your natural preferences and abilities can help you find the right match of activities.

Develop your support team
Many people contribute to the success of elite level athletes, including family members, coaches, trainers, nutritionists, physical therapists, managers, business assistants, and many more. Like an athlete, you probably have many different areas of your life that affect your ability to perform at your best and reach your goals. Try periodically reviewing what kinds of support you need and seeking it out, no matter how big or small it seems. Who or what could support you in moving forward?

The power of practice
It’s often inspiring to me to consider the thousands of hours of practice that the Olympic ahtletes’ performances represent. A big part of practice is simply consistency and repetition: the brain forms and deepens neural connections with repetition so that initially unfamiliar or difficult tasks in time become habitual. But practice (whether of music, sports, or other activities) is also more than just repetition — it involves planning, measurement, analysis, and adjustment.

Serious athletes don’t just go out and run or swim. Their training schedule is carefully planned to allow for periods of intensity followed by periods of rest. During practice, an athlete (and/or her coach) measures her achievement by assessing her form, speed, distance, accuracy or other variables. Taken over time, such measurements offer a picture of improvement, plateaus, or decline that then gets considered in adjusting her training plan as part of a feedback loop.  The point of practice is that you make mistakes. That’s how you learn and improve.

Focus in Action
Borrowing these lessons from the Olympic athletes and applying them to your own goals can be helpful, no matter what your area of focus is. For example, let’s say you want to write a book.

Now, writing is going to inevitably be part of that work! But how exactly you write that book can still be fine-tuned to your particular strengths:

• If you’re good at mapping out big ideas, start each writing session with mind-mapping or outlining to get your ideas flowing.
• If you enjoy fine-tuning your prose, then start each session by editing the previous day’s draft for a few minutes.
• If you’re good at talking about your ideas, try voice recording your first drafts rather than writing them.

Who or what could support you in writing a book? As you imagine your support team, think beyond the obvious candidates. For instance:

• How could a friend, family member, coach, or writing group support you?
• Maybe you need a babysitter on your team to take over childcare duties for a few hours each week?
• Things, rituals, and places can be on your support team too: a new cushion for your chair? an evening bath ritual to help you sleep better? a new pen or notebook? a coffeeshop or particular corner of the library to work in?

Developing a writing practice can borrow from athletes’ planning, measuring, analyzing, and adjusting:

• Developing your own plan means figuring out when will you write? for how long? How will you balance intensity and rest?
• Keeping track of your writing over time helps you discover what helps you be successful.
• Analyze what you measured: was your plan reasonable? too easy? too difficult?
• Adjust your plan periodically based on what you notice in your writing practice. If you miss a session, or don’t write well, just remember — it’s practice. Ask yourself why it didn’t go well, and try again another day.

How might you harness the power of practice for your own goals?

Because our minds tend to jump immediately to what’s missing, it’s important to focus first on what you’ve experienced and achieved this year. By only focusing on what isn’t working, you can often overlook the resources, strengths, and accomplishments already in your life.

So try setting aside some time this week to reflect on a few of these questions — you might write about them in a journal, talk about them with a partner or close friend, or just ask them of yourself at different points during the day. (Such “thought prompts” are a great way to get your subconscious mind working on answering a question while you’re taking a walk, washing dishes, or doing other routine activities.)

So far this year . . .

what are some of the key experiences you’ve had?

who are some of the important people?

what have you learned?

what is the story of this year for you?

what have you created?

what have you shared?

where have you spent your time?

what have you let go of?

what changes have you made?

who have you been?

Only after you’ve spent some time with what this year has meant for you so far, should you move ahead to asking these same questions about the next six months:

• what would you like to experience, learn, create, or share?
• what would you like to change?
• who would you like to become?

If you fly frequently, it’s easy to tune out during these safety reminders: you’ve heard it before, you already have your seatbelt fastened, and you’re paying more attention to your reading material. But ever since I read Amanda Ripley’s fascinating book The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes–and Why, I take 15 seconds to turn my head and identify the exits nearest to my seat.

Much of Ripley’s book is concerned with how the brain responds to extreme stress, like earthquakes, accidents, or other unusual disasters. Under catastrophic stress, people often ignore key facts, delay making decisions, or experience paralyzing fear. Your conscious mind, controlled by the brain’s neocortex, just can’t respond adequately to all the new and surprising elements of the situation. One of the things that comes through many of her examples is that if you “pre-load” your brain with bits of key information, like the location of the exits, that information will be more readily available to you should you actually need it.

So what does this have to do with focus and productivity?

Identify the Exits

Most of us look at our calendars and to-do lists and think primarily about all the things we plan to do, the places we plan to go, and the events we’ll attend. We don’t usually think about the exits.

But things happen.

A project might take longer than you anticipated. Supplies, ingredients, or other materials might be delayed in shipment, out of stock, or otherwise unavailable. You or a family member might get sick. Your car, furnace, or plumbing might need unexpected repairs.

Even several seemingly minor things, if they all occur at the same time, can require you to make adjustments in your plans and expectations. If you’ve already identified the exits before a problem occurs, you’ll be better equipped to respond appropriately, even if you’re sick or stressed.

So take a few moments and think about the week or month ahead:

• which tasks could be postponed if necessary?
• which events could be skipped?
• which priorities could be shifted?

Keep in Mind the Nearest Exit May be Behind You

The airline safety instructions remind passengers of a life-saving tip, which is that the closest exit may not be in front of you, or in the direction in which the crowd is moving. Turning your head to check where the exits lie makes this unexpected truth part of the reality your brain could use to help you survive, should it be necessary.

Checking for the “exits” in your schedule doesn’t mean that you will need to use them. It just means you know where they are. If something comes up this week, where could you make adjustments if you had to? What do you tend to assume is fixed that might actually be flexible?

Relax and Enjoy the Flight

Once you’ve looked to see where the exits are, you don’t need to keep looking at them during the flight. It’s the same with your weekly or monthly planning. Just make a note of what could be adjusted if necessary, and get on with your projects and plans.