What happened to the goals you set in January?

Part one

The register

List what you actually said you were going to do this year. Work goals, side projects, the course you were going to book, the CV you were going to rewrite. Then mark each one honestly. Nobody else is reading this.

Strava analysed more than 800 million logged activities and found the single most common day to abandon a New Year resolution is 19 January. Losing goals is the normal outcome, not a personal failing.

Part two

Why September actually works

The back to school feeling is not nostalgia. Behavioural scientists call these moments temporal landmarks, and they measurably change what people are willing to attempt.

In a study of nearly 12,000 university gym members, attendance rose 47 per cent at the start of a new term. New year lifted it 12 per cent. A new week lifted it 33 per cent. The start of term outperformed January.

You get one of these landmarks in September whether you use it or not. The question is what you point it at.

Dai, Milkman and Riis, The Fresh Start Effect: Temporal Landmarks Motivate Aspirational Behavior, Management Science, 2014.

Part three

What do you want 31 December to look like?

Not a wish list. Three things, written as though the year has already finished and they happened. Start each one with "By 31 December I have". If you can only think of one, write one.

Vague goals are the ones that go quiet first. A goal you cannot picture finishing is a goal you cannot tell whether you are behind on.

Part four

Attach each one to a moment

This is the part most people skip, and it is the part that works. For each outcome, write a plan in the form "If it is Tuesday at 8pm, then I will spend forty minutes on my CV". Tie the action to a specific cue: a time, a day, a place, or something that already happens in your week.

Across 94 studies, people who wrote if-then plans were substantially more likely to reach their goals than people who only held the intention. The effect was strongest on the two failures that matter here: never getting started, and drifting off partway through. Gollwitzer and Sheeran, Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement, 2006.

Part five

One thing you are putting down

A reset that only adds is a reset that fails by half term. Name one commitment, habit, meeting or obligation you are letting go of before December, so the new things have somewhere to live.

A review of 138 studies covering nearly 20,000 people found that monitoring progress towards a goal reliably improves the odds of reaching it, and that the effect is stronger when progress is written down rather than just thought about. Harkin and colleagues, Psychological Bulletin, 2016.