Why New Year's Resolutions are a Joke, and the Foolproof Method for Lasting Improvements

I have never made a New Year’s resolution.

Okay well, barring any lapse in my memory, I haven’t made any New Year’s resolutions in my life.

I’ve never thought about why I haven’t before, but now with a chance to ponder in my thinking chair, I realize that they’re, well, a joke.

Any improvement effort I’ve made wasn’t dependent on the turn of a calendar. And it’s baffling how we set the same goals every year when our failure rates are so high.

But my biggest issue with New Year’s resolutions, or NYR’s as I’ll call them, is that they’re incomplete.

Just think about some common NYR’s you hear about:

“I’ll finally lose the weight this year.”
“My website/channel/podcast will gain a ton of subscribers.”
“I’ll save more money in 20XX than ever before.”

And do you see the problem with all of these resolutions (besides the fact that they’re all extremely vague)?

The real issue with NYR’s is that they’re all goal-oriented.

And while goals are good in that they give us results to strive for, they are still, like I said before, incomplete.

Goals only account for the initial stages of any improvement effort, but outside of those first planning stages and the performance reviews later on, they’re practically worthless.

In order for any goal to be effective, it has to evolve into something greater: a system change. And a low effort one in particular.

Instead of chasing the results you want, you have to create a system that consistently produces those results.

Because as time passes and your motivation wanes (like it always does), your great results will be short-lived at best, and nonexistent at worst.

But if you changed your system while your motivation was high and you had the time to commit, those results will remain stable for months and even years down the road, simply because you’ll be doing what you always do.

That’s the advantage of system-oriented change.

The Five Why’s Revisited

I touched on system-oriented change in my Complainer to Problem Solver post, but I didn’t go into too much detail there. So here’s an excerpt from the five “why?” section of that post to give a refresher:

One strategy I’ve found to be helpful is to ask “why?” multiple times. Doing that will point to the root cause of the issue so you don’t chase red herrings.

If you make bad grades for example, just ask yourself “why?”.

You might say it’s because you like to party on the weekends and leave it that, but you haven’t gotten to the root cause.

Here’s a better way to ask “why?”:

Q: Why do you get bad grades?
A: Because I’m not prepared for exams

Q: Why aren’t you prepared for exams?
A: Because my professor is terrible and I don’t study enough

Q: Why don’t you study enough? (Notice I didn’t ask about the professor)
A: Because I don’t have the time

Q: Why don’t you have the time?
A: Because I get back to the dorm late on weekends

Q: Why do you choose to go out on the weekends instead of studying when your grades are bad?
A: Because it’s more enjoyable than studying (Read: I value my social life much more than my education)

Notice how we framed the questions to look for continuous behaviors instead of dead end reasoning. We also focused on what you can control instead of immediately blaming the environment.

Or to clarify that last paragraph, we used the five “why’s?” to find potential system changes.

We then took the goal of earning better grades and traced it to the biggest flaw in the system—valuing social status to the detriment of academic success.

New Year's resolutions why — Always work below the surface.

The student should now shift focus from the previous goal of earning better grades to the more relevant one of changing his philosophy towards school and education.

From this point on, he would need specific knowledge and advice to improve his process, but the work of figuring out his true goal is already done. And the initial one to increase his GPA will take care of itself once the fixes are in place.

The student could spend more hours in the library or read a few textbooks, but the consistent change he wants won’t occur until he addresses that key system flaw.

This is how you develop goals into realistic change. You look for factors that have the most significant impact on your results and then improve each individually.

But then how do you ensure that your improvement efforts actually happen?

Well, this is how…

“Poke a What?”

So there’s another part of system improvement that I mentioned earlier but didn’t elaborate on, and that’s the fact that these changes need to be low effort.

In order to explain why this is important, I’ll introduce a concept from the world of manufacturing called Poka-yoke (pronounced poh-kah-yoh-keh). It’s a Japanese term that translates to “mistake-proofing”. And the concept is related to what the name implies.

New Year's Resolutions poka-yoke — A system without poka-yoke…

For example, a test fixture might be changed in a manufacturing process to only fit parts with a certain shape. That fixture can only be used for the right parts, so any errors that might occur by placing the wrong part in the fixture are eliminated.

And this is only one of the many examples of poka-yoke. Creativity leads to numerous solutions when you get into application, but one of the staples of poka-yoke, and the reason I brought it up in the first place, is that effort plays a huge role.

An optimized system will either eliminate the potential for error, or at the very least, make it easier to complete the desired action instead of making those errors.

It’s a path of least resistance approach that works remarkably well. And now I’m sure you can see the parallels.

Similarly to a poka-yoke in a production environment, a good improvement initiative will make it easier to do the right thing.

So to illustrate a loose example from my own life, I made use of poka-yoke when I lost 40 pounds a few years back.

Sure, I learned the numbers behind weight loss and knew that overeating was the cause of my problem, but after I lost the first 20 pounds or so, I was having a tough time sticking to my calorie limit.

Enter intermittent fasting.

I’ll make a separate post about my experience with intermittent fasting (or IF for short), but to simplify, it’s pretty much just scheduled eating. The most popular form has an eating window of 8 hours—mine was 10 AM to 6 PM—and then you fast the rest of the day.

It’s easy to stick to this once you get used to it because it’s not a drastic change. You just condense the time frame of when you normally eat.

This little tweak did wonders for me and I still use it today since it’s so easy to follow.

IF was the poka-yoke for my diet that eliminated mistakes (late-night snacks, overeating, etc.) and made it easier for me to complete my desired action (eat a low calorie diet on a consistent basis).

Changing the times I ate did more for me than running 2 miles a day would have ever done. Because frankly, I would have quit running after the second day.