From January to December: Keeping New Year Resolutions Alive

• Setting achievable, realistic New Year resolutions will help keep them alive year-round.
• Explore practical methods to overcome mid-year challenges and stay motivated.
• Learn strategies to reflect, refine, and improve your goals as the year progresses.

New Year, New Me

To most of us, the end of a year and the beginning of the next feels like a blank slate. Why should it not? The New Year signifies a fresh start and new beginnings across cultures and borders. Come December, and all everyone talks about is new year resolutions. Traveling more, losing weight, eating healthy, doing yoga—we’ve heard it all. We join the gym; we buy yoga mats, and we purchase more veggies. But do we follow through with our resolutions? Research says no. More than 80% of people abandon their resolutions by mid-February. Shocking, right? So, how do we keep alive our resolutions—from January to December?

January: The Blank Slate

On New Year’s Eve, as the clock strikes midnight, millions of us vow to improve our lives. This is often because New Year symbolizes the promise of change. It gives us a clean slate—free of last year’s disappointments and failures. We sweep under the mat all the bad memories and stack our walls with pictures from the good ones. We sit down with our loved ones and, in a fit of enthusiasm, discuss ambitious goals for the New Year. 

In January, we follow through with our resolutions excitedly. But soon, we realize that our resolutions are losing momentum by the second month. We let go because of adulthood, right? Why bother ourselves with more when we already have enough things to worry about? Well, we might have to start asking why this cycle repeats every single year. Many resolutions fail because they are unrealistic or too broad. Setting realistic and achievable goals might be the way to go this year. Actionable and structured plans help maintain motivation and resilience. As they say, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

Laying the Foundation Right

For the first few months of the New Year, you can focus on habit formation. The following are a few ways to start strong:

SMART Goals

SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. If you want to start reading again, your resolution might be “Finish reading all the books I bought last year.” Instead, think—“I want to read for 20 minutes a day and complete 200 pages a month.”

Creating Routines

Repetition forms habits. Set a certain time for your goals. This helps in habit formation. If one of your resolutions is to learn crochet, schedule half an hour a day for the same. 

Maintaining Motivation

In the beginning, reading a few pages a day might feel like your resolution is going nowhere. When you feel you’re running short on motivation to follow through, visualize yourself completing a book and picking another one. Visualize yourself wearing a sweater you’ve crocheted and receiving compliments on it. 

Reaching a Checkpoint

As you reach the middle of the year, look back at how far you’ve come and what’s more to achieve. You may find your enthusiasm waning. The following steps will help you stay on track:

Celebrate Small Wins

Your writing streak was 90 days? Have you finished two books that have been sitting on your bedside table forever? Your cookies don’t come out of the oven charred now? Those are wins! Remember to celebrate your progress, no matter how small or insignificant. Reward yourself with an uncharred cookie or a candy-bar because you’ve overcome the hardest step—habit formation. 

Reflect and Redirect

Reflecting on your currently relevant needs and learnings so far, redirect your goals. You might have started the New Year with the intention of exercising more. Your resolution to work out for an hour every day might’ve changed to lifting heavier weights. Recalibrate your goals according to current needs.

Stay Accountable

Have people around you who help you keep track of (and cheer) your progress. Share your wins with your best friend, your partner, your therapist, or your favorite online community. This practice will help you stay accountable and motivated.

Staying Consistent

As the end of the year slowly approaches, you may be tempted to pause with the holiday festivities. While celebrating your progress throughout the year, acknowledge areas of growth. Here are a few ways to help stay consistent with your resolutions during the last few months of the year:

Create Micro-Goals

Halloween, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas—It gets hectic as the holiday season approaches. We might think of giving up and starting afresh on the next New Year’s Eve. Instead, set small and achievable goals for yourself, which will help you maintain momentum for the coming year. This will ensure the maintenance of habit formation. For example, instead of trying to finish an entire book a month, shorten it down to one chapter a week. 

Plan for the Next New Year

Your experience in following through with your resolutions will have helped you gain a new perspective on your habits and challenges. Use these learnings to curate more refined goals for the next year. This will help in ensuring the continued progress of your goals. 

Takeaways for Success

Although everyone has their method, here are some general tips to ensure you follow through with your resolutions:

• Creating a vision-board  may help you envision what your year looks like. Create a collage, physically or digitally, using pictures of everything you want. Be it places you want to visit, hobbies you want to pick up, or things you want to buy. You can position your vision board in a place where you see it often. Creating a visual representation of all that you want helps you envision your goals better. You can find templates for vision boards on Canva. Pinterest offers plenty of inspiration, too. If you’re more of a DIY person, Zeen might do it for you. 
• Use apps or journals to help you log your daily achievements or challenges. Progress-tracking apps like Way of Life is a great option. Productive, a habit-building app, might help those who need motivation to stay in the game. While Seven encourages you to stay fit, WaterMinder keeps you hydrated. If you’re old-school, Day One will help you keep track through journaling. 
• Allow yourself to make mistakes or underperform on your bad days. It is okay to miss self-imposed targets some days. You can always make up for it by doing more on your good days. 
• The challenges you face along the way are learning opportunities that help you rethink your goals. Be compassionate to yourself, and they are not failures.
• Do not compare your goals or achievements to someone else. No two lives are the same—your needs, aspirations, and goals are unique. Remember, you’re your own competition.

Keeping your New Year resolutions alive needs more than just determination. You have to cultivate habits that improve consistency and adaptability. Breaking down your goals into actionable steps, reflecting on your progress, and refining your goals is the way to go. Remember, perfection isn’t the goal—progress is. So, what steps will you take today to make your resolutions last all year?