How to successfully keep a New Year’s resolution?
What’s behind the failure of New Year’s resolutions and how to successfully keep them.A new year, a clean slate, another 12 months to improve your life. And just like every year, now it’s seriously going to happen. And you know what? It will! Especially if you approach resolutions rationally.
In the article you will learn:
Why resolutions fail
Do you make a habit of going all out with resolutions and big life changes? You run the risk of failing. Not because having high ambitions and working towards them is bad. But this approach is less realistic and few people succeed in making too big a change on the first try.
Far more important is the consistency of your efforts. Instead of changing your bad habits in the first month of the year, try to make the change last for the long term. More importantly, don’t be discouraged by potential setbacks.
Behind the discouragement is the psychological effect of resignation. If you break a resolution, you may feel that the effort is “reset” and you have to start over. Perpetual starts are frustrating; no one wants to start all over again. But think about this: if you don’t brush your teeth once, are you going to neglect clean teeth for life? Or you don’t keep a party and you only sleep 6 hours instead of 8. Will you tell yourself that sleep is no longer important?
The phenomenon of resignation can be illustrated by the most common New Year’s resolution of both Slovaks and Czechs – to lose weight and eat healthier. According to the STEM/MARK survey:
- For 26% of respondents, only a few days,
- for 23% of respondents, 3 months,
- for 22% of them, a month,
- For only 7%, a year.
Lukáš Roubík, nutritional consultant, trainer, bodybuilder and co-founder of the Institute of Modern Nutrition, has been busting myths in nutrition for a long time and his recommendation is clear: it’s the effort all year round that counts, not a single rule-breaking.
The psychological and biochemical effect of finishing things
Having too many things on your mind is neither good for your mental state nor for your work efficiency. It’s even one of the paths to burnout (read our article When it’s time to change jobs). The problem can arise with tasks, or in this case, resolutions, that we can’t complete anytime soon. In psychology, this is called completion bias, or task completion bias, and it affects us all.
Harvard Business School examined how completing work tasks affected the motivation and satisfaction of 500 employees from different segments. Employees who started their day with simple subtasks were the most satisfied and motivated.
Our brains are addicted to completing tasks. Every task we check off gives us a dose of dopamine, which we need much more than in the past when overwhelmed with sensory information from social networks. A good tip for keeping, or rather maintaining, your resolutions would be: break them down into sub-tasks and goals.
Try Kaizen
Kaizen, Japanese for “change for the better”, is a method, philosophy, or even a management technique of gradual improvement. You can apply it to your work and your personal life. As a Java programmer, for example, you want to do things more efficiently, procrastinate less, or have more order in your priorities. If you could increase your efficiency by 1% every day of the year, you’d be 365% more efficient at the end of the year.
The method originated in the 1950s as a form of lean approach to productivity management at Japan’s Toyota. It spread to the West, where the Kaizen Institute was later established to help companies adopt lean management best practices.
Kaizen is defined by continuous improvement, which is something you are no stranger to as a tester or developer thanks to continuous integration and delivery. Among its basic principles you will find:
- Instant problem solving,
- The realization that there is still room for improvement,
- Take improvement as the goal, not perfection.
So before you decide to abandon your resolutions after the first burger and fries or the first missed deadline of the year, give yourself a break for a while. See things from a different perspective and try to find solutions. Next time, have a burger without fries and delegate some of the bag to a colleague with spare capacity. It may not be a 100% improvement, but you’ll still be better than you were yesterday. And that’s what counts.
If you’re looking for a job change in the new year and would like to go into IT, check out our vacancies, where you’ll also find jobs for people with no previous IT experience (e.g. IT tester consultant).
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