I’m always looking for self-improvement projects, and New Years tends to be a good forcing function where everyone is thinking about this kind of thing. This year is no different, but this time around I want to do things a bit differently. My experience with past years is that a year is really too long of a time for most of the types of goals I’m interested in. The goals I set tend to either be project-based (have this concrete deliverable by the end of the year) or habit-based (establish this habit this year).

For project-based goals, a year gives me too much time to procrastinate. Why worry about starting on January 5th if January 6th will do? Why worry about sprinting to finish a sub-task by April when there’s still May? Before I know it, the project has completely fallen off my radar.

Habit-based goals run into a similar procrastination problem, but on the other hand giving myself a year to set up a habit is a really low bar in the first place. Depending on the habit, if I can perform it consistently for a month I have a good chance of making it longer than that. After 2-3 months it seems to be pretty solid. I’d prefer to have self-improvement be a constant project, rather than something I do until March and then coast for the rest of the year.

So instead, this year my goal is to do 12 sets of smaller goals, one per month. These should build off of each other, such that completing all 12 will result in habits and deliverables that I would think too ambitious to make a one-year goal. On top of leading to more ambitious outcomes, I expect this type of framing to simultaneously make it more likely that I actually complete the goals, as I would constantly be working towards a fairly limited objective with an impending deadline.

I expect earlier months to be dedicated to improving my “infrastructure” for achieving personal goals in general. Think topics around productivity, energy, and time management. Later months may involve more specific skills that I’m trying to improve, but I still expect almost all goals to be related to a general theme of improving general competence. I’m optimistic that actually completing 12 such goal sets will lead to a significant boost to my personal capability levels.

The purpose of this blog (or at least the goals section) is to provide a public source of accountability and social credit. It gives me some concrete thing I can point to and be proud of if I complete my monthly goals, regardless of whether those goals had easily-identifiable outputs. It also encourages me to crystalize my thoughts and reasoning, and motivates good retrospectives.

I know a lot of people are against New Year’s Resolutions because you can make personal resolutions any time of year, and if you think you will only succeed because of the day then your odds of following through are pretty low. I somewhat agree with this, but there is a reason I thought to do this around New Year’s and not at some other arbitrary time of year. If you have goals you want to achieve that you think of in July, go ahead and start in July. But if you have a vague sense of “I wish some things about my life/habits were different, but don’t know exactly what that means”, then it’s a good way to trigger some reflection. If you resonate with this description and are reading this now, you can use this as a trigger regardless of what time of year it happens to be. If you do, I’d love to hear about it :)

Anyway, now that we have the framing and motivation out of the way, it’s time to jump into January!