Continuing a New Year's No Resolution Tradition and Tips! - 2025
Since 2016 I've been resolving not to set New Year's resolutions and it's gone amazingly well. I've managed to accomplish all my resolutions every year.
Happy New Year!
Wishing everyone a happy new year ahead! 2024 has been challenging and I'm looking forward to an interesting 2025 ahead. I hope 2025 brings you all and your families peace, prosperity and joy.
2024 has been an exciting year where we all learned that the coming AI apocalypse will involve lots of strange random images, videos, comments and lots of content for memes and jokes. It's also been a sad year with continued and new wars, poverty and environmental destruction. Even in darkness there is hope yet 2024 was a year that tested our hope.
Wishing everyone a wonderful new year ahead. Another chance to try and fix the world's problems. And maybe our own. 🤭
Resolving to do nothing-ish
Since 2015/16 I’ve made a habit of resolving not to set New Year’s resolutions. This came from a general frustration with the process of deciding to do things which I failed to accomplish or more commonly just forgot about until the cycle repeated again. It was also reactionary to the social-media-craze of rich-people-showing-off amazing resolutions made possible by millions in supporting staff and capital.
It was also a decision to focus more on simple basics - being a father, husband, manager, and citizen. Rather than trying to always be more, more, more. In some ways its similar to my efforts at Becoming Less:
and my reflections around my personal Values:
This also isn’t entirely accurate as I ‘resolved’ formally to do nothing in 2016, 2017, and then completely forgot about the whole thing and just focused on kids, family and work until last year when I remembered the whole thing and decided to write about it again. I still count these years as I was consistently not doing anything…
Continuous resolu~goals
One thing that has worked well for the last few years has been formalizing continuous personal goal setting and long-term life planning. This may be the same thing as New Year’s Resolutions to some people but to me it has worked out very differently. I wrote about it recently on LinkedIn.
Initially, this approach was clunky as well. I set too many goals, across too many areas of my life. Yet because I did it, forgot about it, and looked at it again after 3-months, I was able to iterate the format and approach bit-by-bit. Eventually hitting something that was worth while enough that I wanted to keep doing it.
This works well for me as the goals are simple things, woven into my existing work and life - some examples are things like “be more consistent with substack writing” and “find ways to spend more time with my parents”. This has worked for me more than any big-bang resolution that simply fizzled out.
Other approaches
If you are interested in other approaches to resolutions, I recommend these posts that hit my feed during the holidays. Some are similar to what I’ve been doing and some are unique in their own right. Thank you to these and other authors for all the info and tips during the holidays.
- has a great post on a breaking down resolutions like we wash dishes. I’ve got another old post with tips on dishwashing for those fascinated by the topic.
- has a general ‘how-to-get-better-at-things’ post which is nice to read even if he makes it out as fitness-focused.
- has a pretty graphic overview of Atomic Habits (the book I don’t like) concepts which are reasonable and useful for some. To understand why I dislike the book checkout the If Books Could Kill Podcast about it.
Offline - I recommend “Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning is Hard and How to Make it Easy” by
. While not specifically a book about goals and resolutions, it is by far the best book on how to set goals and get things done.
Past New Year’s No Resolutions
For those interested, these are the past posts on my no-new-years-resolutions.
