Everyday Systems: everydaysystems: message 60 of 74

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New year's gives a great occasion to reflect on how to
better yourself. The problem is the resolutions people
come up with tend not to stick. How to fix this?

First, what's the exact nature of the problem? I think
it's mainly just one of scope: a year is too long for
effective planning. It's too tempting to
procrastinate, to overload yourself with different
resolutions to be executed in parallel, to despair of
reaching that great, distant milestone. 

The solution: change the scope, make it monthly
instead of yearly, and just (at most) one resolution
to focus on a month. A month is long enough to from a
habit, but short enough to plan effectively and
provide a reachable e milestone. All you have to keep
track of is yes/no, did you or didn't you do the one
thing you are focused on each day. It works well with
slashing out "days on habit" from the calendar. It
even gives you some wiggle room to screw up a few days
and still hit the proverbial 3 perfect weeks to form
the habit. At the end of the month, the idea is you
now have a habit which does not require huge resolve
and can move on to a new resolution. If it didn't go
so well, think about it a bit, and re-resolve it for
the next month. Maybe you'll want to tweak it a bit.
Maybe you'll realize it didn't really make sense and
resolve something else. Even in this worst case
scenario, it's better to know this after a month and
move on than have to wait a whole year for a clean
slate. If it really takes the average person 12
attempts to reform a habit, that's not a whole lot of
habits in a lifetime if you're stuck with one shot a
year.

Ben Franklin's ledger of virtues that I'm always
talking about was similar, but this is more specific
and I think has a better scope (his was just 1
week/virtue, but he'd cycle back). It's close enough
that I'll claim it as precedent.

Reinhard