
A New Way to Make Rational Resolutions - juanre
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303453004579290510733740616
======
guylhem
Listening to your emotions is important, as the article states.

But there is something more even more important - the schedule.

Why make new year resolutions? It is known to be inefficient and fail-prone.

My personal method : make "whatever month it is" resolutions, with a timeframe
- and don't do that on the first day of the month only.

For ex, in february I may make some february resolutions, which will have a
different timeframe (ex: some will be evaluated at t+1 in march, some at t+4
in june, etc). I may add another batch of resolutions in any given day of the
month - I just file them under a month since it's easy to remember.

This also enables many cycles of resolutions in a given year, which is useful
in case some of them haven't been held - it won't be too late in april to set
new resolutions.

Track them using metrics, and have clear "next steps", then it's not really
complicated.

Using last year as an example, I have had a failure rate of ~25%, which I
consider very acceptable.

Think "release early, release often", or compare waterfall/iterative/agile
methods, figure out which is better, and apply it to your life.

~~~
irremediable
Well said. This is the biggest change I've made to my resolutions this year.
I'm implementing them on a fixed timeframe -- and deliberately adding
deadlines to my calendar, to check my progress and reassess the resolutions.

------
meryn
"Attendees [...] learned a technique called "pre-hindsight" that uses
emotional cues to create more foolproof plans. It works like this: Imagine
that six months have passed, and you haven't achieved the body of your dreams.
How surprised are you? The less surprised you are, the less likely it is you
will succeed at your goal. Then think in detail about each reason you wouldn't
be surprised if June comes and the number on the scale hadn't budged. Each
reason—whether "I don't have time" or "I don't like running in the
mornings"—is a possible cause of failure. Using the surprise level to
anticipate these is crucial to creating a plan to address each weak point."

I like this technique a lot. Thinking about how surprised you'd be if you do
not achieve your objective.

I think the technique has similarities with the exercise that Steven Covey
writes about in "The Seven Habits" where you must think about what you want
other people to say about you at your funeral. It engages you in a special
kind of way, perhaps helping you to uncover knowledge that you did not know
you held.

------
pjscott
Example schedule here, with brief descriptions of what the curriculum was in
May 2013:

[http://rationality.org/schedule/](http://rationality.org/schedule/)

It's changed some since then; they do regular follow-ups on each participant
for six weeks afterward, which lets them measure what works and what doesn't,
and iterate based on that.

------
gojomo
Minimum Viable New Year's Resolutions (MVNYR)?

