Resolutions 2019: Set your goals for the New Year

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RESOLUTIONS 2019

Anna Boroshok helps you actually achieve your resolutions 2019.

New Year is approaching and you have already started thinking about new year resolutions. It feels exciting: a new chance to achieve something meaningful and important in 2019. But then the planning process hits and you realize that you need to move some of your old resolutions from 2018 to 2019 because they did not become reality. But it does not mean you should quit planning, right? It means you should start planning smarter.

Before we jump into the smarter planning, let us look at the typical mistakes we do when setting ambitious goals for ourselves and pick up some examples of such goals:

  • Finally launch my consultancy business
  • Lose 20 kg
  • Learn French etc…

All these goals sound so exciting until January passes and nothing has moved an inch especially if you have set only the goals but did not do any planning on how you will make them come true. You think, ‘What if magic happens?!’ But time passes by and magic does not happen. You get somewhat upset by little or no progress and wait to see if something happens in February. But February passes uneventfully. In the following months you will probably do some trivial or even non-trivial things but this will not bring you to your ambitious goals. Sounds familiar?

Now, we have all already heard about cutting a big elephant into small pieces, right? But this also does not help. You know why? Let us say you have cut the annoying huge elephant into many pieces but what do you do then? You start imagining how you will do (eat) those pieces somewhere sometime in the following 11 months. Be honest with yourself, you postpone the most difficult chewy pieces until later months focusing on pieces which are easy to eat. Have you noticed that? Danger! Easy solutions are our biggest enemies on the way to success. They create a feeling of busyness and even importance that we are working on achieving our big goal. But in reality, we are procrastinating doing 80% of tasks which bring only 20% of results instead of focusing on 20% of tasks that will bring us to 80% of results.

The problem with all long-term planning is complexity and lack of clarity, not only about the tasks but also where they will bring you. Will they work out or not? Will they bring the desirable results? That is why I propose you to plan and test your goals and tasks in sprints. This methodology was first used for IT projects but being so efficient, it started penetrating in other spheres of our lives including personal goals. Let’s have a look at how it works.