No New Year's Resolutions Please

Do New Year's Resolutions matter? There is certainly some value in new beginnings, stepping back from the action, and reflecting on what we want to do differently. But how many New Year's Resolutions have you abandoned come February? (It's only 6 days into the year, and I already broke two...) Instead, to deliver on your commitments, adopt a set of small regular (weekly, for example) practices and rituals that give you peace, power and/or freedom, or whatever else you wish.

I guess you catch my drift: New Year's Resolutions don't really work for me. I mean, by 3 January, sixty hours into the New Year, I had already broken two of them. 

(To maintain my reputation, I won't say what they were; let's just say one had to do with communication, the other with health. If things proceed at this rate, it's going to be an interesting year.) 

Since I am an open-minded guy, I'm fine if New Year's Resolutions work for you. But do they?

Here is my somewhat counter-intuitive finding: It's not the commitment that counts. It's the tiny actions you take on a regular basis. I call them rituals. Rituals are routine actions in service of a commitment. See my new TED Talk from December to see what I mean:

 

Let's take an example we are all familiar with: the onslaught of email. Assume you have a New Year's Resolution to keep your emails in check and keep your life from being dominated by them. Clearly a legitimate commitment that makes sense. 

If you simply leave it at that commitment, you have no prayer of delivering it (in fact the emails are piling up while you read this). 

Instead I recommend you adopt a simple ritual: You schedule one hour a day (in my case, 1pm-2pm daily) to answer your emails from yesterday. 

Yes, not the new ones. Only the ones from yesterday. Like a good inventory manager, the rule is not LIFO (last in, first out) but FIFO (first in, first out).

(I started doing this simple ritual two years ago, and recently read that Tony Hsieh of Zappos does exactly the same thing. He calls it "Yesterbox." And it brings him just as much freedom and peace of mind as it does for me.)

You can do this with any commitment you have. In fact small rituals are at the source of each large accomplishment in my life, from getting my Ph.D. in record time to publishing seven books to millions in revenues.

I think it was Malcolm Gladwell who said you need 10,000 hours to master anything in any field. No idea where he got that number from, but let's just assume he is in the ballpark. 

If I need 10,000 hours to master my tennis game or the piano or behavioral economics, then I would need to schedule those hours in some way. 

For example, I could spend one hour a day, five hours a week on something in that field, which would come to roughly 250 hours a year, so I would have attained mastery within... forty years. 

If that sounds depressing, we could always hope that Gladwell is wrong and it takes only 1,000 hours. Be that as it may, here is the cool thing: It's not about the end goal. It's about the way there. Every hour you spend on something you love gives you life along the way.

Happy New Year! May 2016 bring you even closer to your dreams. 

What do you say? Do New Year's Resolutions work for you? And what regular (weekly) practices or rituals will you schedule in your calendar to deliver your commitments? I look forward to your comments, here or on my blog http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/.

Dr. Thomas D. Zweifel is a strategy & performance expert and coach for leaders of Global 1000 companies. His book Strategy-In-Action: Marrying Planning, People and Performance offers a 7-step process to close the gap between planning and performance. (Click here for a free excerpt; for the new German edition, just out from Springer, click here)