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Resolution Reboot: February’s Your Fresh Start

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Resolution Reboot: February's Your Fresh Start At the beginning of the year, we all get hyped up with that whole “New Year, New Me!” vibe. But once the confetti settles, our resolutions crash and burn faster than a balloon with a slow leak. Come end of January, we’re like, “What resolutions?”

If you’re aiming for a February reboot or you’ve kicked things off strong and want to keep that momentum rolling all year, watch out for these resolution roadblocks:

  • Willpower Woes. Counting on willpower alone usually doesn’t cut it for long-term goals. Instead, work on building discipline gradually, taking small steps, and cutting yourself some slack when things don’t go as planned.
  • Ignoring Psychology. Knowing what makes you tick is crucial for real change. Figure out what triggers your bad habits and tweak your environment to make it easier to stick to your goals.
  • Negative Self-Talk. Beating yourself up when you slip up only makes it harder to stay on track. Treat setbacks as learning experiences, accept your limitations, adjust your expectations, and keep pushing forward.
  • Overreaching Goals. Trying to tackle impossible goals is like sprinting a marathon—you’ll burn out fast. Take it easy by setting achievable milestones each month and gradually building momentum.
  • Lack of Specificity. Swap out vague resolutions like “get fit” or “be a better person” for specific, doable goals. Start small, like running a mile or cutting out afternoon sodas, and keep checking in to stay on track.
  • Accountability Absence. Goals often fizzle out without someone to answer to. Pair up with a buddy, join a group, or use apps to keep yourself focused and motivated.
  • Overlooking Progress. Celebrate the little victories—they’re what keep you going. Don’t just focus on the big picture; recognize every step forward to boost your confidence and motivation.

Idea for Impact: If January didn’t pan out like you hoped, no worries! Give your New Year resolutions a reboot. Turn those intentions into solid themes, keep tabs on your progress, and set some fresh targets. Snag a new planner, jot down some realistic goals, and let February be the month you truly kick it into gear and start smashing those resolutions!

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Use This Trick to Make Daily Habits Stick This Year
  2. What the Dry January Trap Shows Us About Extremes
  3. How to Turn Your Procrastination Time into Productive Time
  4. An Effective Question to Help Feel the Success Now
  5. If Stuck, Propel Forward with a ‘Friction Audit’

How to (Finally!) Stop Procrastinating, Just Do It

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Go to the gym consistently and unfailingly, even if it’s just to walk on the treadmill for ten minutes.

Even if your legs are sore, just go.

Even if you’re not feeling it, just go.

Even if there’s that something else you’d rather be doing, just go.

Just go.

Because once you’re there at the gym, you usually will get into the mood to run or achieve something more substantial.

Just do it.

Compel yourself to do just a bit of what you’re struggling to do.

Just taking action, even if you don’t plan on achieving much, can usually help you get and stay motivated.

Inertia will give way to momentum.

Idea for Impact: The “Just Do It” attitude can help you surmount mental blocks. Folks who actually get things done work at whatever they are interested in, even when they don’t feel like doing it.

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  2. How to … Make Work Less Boring
  3. How to Turn Your Procrastination Time into Productive Time
  4. 5 Minutes to Greater Productivity [Two-Minute Mentor #11]
  5. What the Dry January Trap Shows Us About Extremes

Separate the Job of Creating and Improving

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You can’t write and edit, engrave and buff, or create and analyze simultaneously. If you try to do so, the editor will hinder the creator’s progress.

Don’t let the evaluator’s biases and entrenched behaviors get in the way of the maker’s creative process. Keep the niggling editor from creeping up during the initial draft.

Idea for Impact: In the early stages, the creator’s mind should be free from any judgment. Revising your way into a cut above is far more effective than trying to conjure brilliance out of thin air.

Wondering what to read next?

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  3. Why Doing a Terrible Job First Actually Works
  4. Just Start with ONE THING
  5. What the Dry January Trap Shows Us About Extremes

The “Adjacent Possible” Mental Model

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The “Adjacent Possible” consists of all those ideas that are one step away from what actually exists. One thing leads to another, and when you achieve an adjacent possibile, you may hit upon more adjacent possibles.

So exploring the edges can take you somewhere new that you can’t predefine. The adjacent possible is something that gets continuously shaped and reshaped by your actions and your choices.

Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (2010) urges, “The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.”

Johnson borrowed the conception from biologist Stuart A. Kauffman’s The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution (1993.) This book examines a fundamental law of evolution: how everything has to evolve one step at a time within its realm of possibility, which sits directly adjacent to its current position. Novelty isn’t an abrupt, isolated happening, but rather stem from the voyaging of what is adjacent or related to what already exists.

Idea for Impact: Start at the edge of what works. Then, explore the adjacent possibile space. You may just get to those streams of opportunities that lead to the next big thing.

Wondering what to read next?

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  3. Do You Really Need More Willpower?
  4. Use This Trick to Make Daily Habits Stick This Year
  5. What the Dry January Trap Shows Us About Extremes

Use Friction to Make or Break Habits

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It’s human nature to rely more on environmental triggers than we think. As a result, you’re more inclined to achieve a goal if you reduce any possible friction—i.e., eliminate obstacles that could make it harder for you to reach your goal.

One powerful method to tweak your environment to change behavior is the “hit the ground running” mindset. For instance, to start a morning exercise habit, reduce the friction of getting dressed for a workout by sleeping in your workout attire. Put your shoes and socks by the bed. On wintry days, set your jacket on the countertop by your keys.

Idea for Impact: Control your environment; change your habits

Don’t depend on trying to stay motivated to change behavior. Motivation can waver from one minute to the next. Reduce any potential friction in getting stuff done.

Equally, increase the friction for things you should avoid—e.g., break a bad habit by making it more inconvenient.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. An Effective Question to Help Feel the Success Now
  2. What the Dry January Trap Shows Us About Extremes
  3. 5 Minutes to Greater Productivity [Two-Minute Mentor #11]
  4. Just Start with ONE THING
  5. Separate the Job of Creating and Improving

How to Avoid the Sunday Night Blues

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A proper Sunday isn’t complete unless you’ve expertly wasted every precious moment and then find yourself submerged in a sea of sorrow as that sinking feeling settles in your stomach, signaling the end of the glorious weekend.

The “Sunday-Night Blues” revolve around bidding farewell to the weekend and bracing yourself for yet another dreadful week ahead. It’s a baffling feeling when you can’t account for where the time went or what happened to all those noble intentions you had.

The tranquility of the weekend gives way to a somber mood, a sense of impending doom, and a restless night of sleep. It’s even hard to accept that the brief respite from the previous week’s work is ending.

Here’re some tips to help you ward off those Sunday-Night Blues. Spread out your chores and errands throughout the week, or better yet, tackle the tedious tasks early on—the earlier you deal with pain, the less painful it is. Tie up any loose or annoying ends on Friday, so you don’t have to give it a second thought over the weekend.

Take a few moments earlier during the weekend to plan and organize your upcoming week. This simple act will grant you greater control and preparedness, easing any anxiety or stress over the upcoming week.

Idea for Impact: Sunday evenings are meant to be cherished, not squandered in sorrow. With careful planning, a sprinkle of self-care, and a dash of positive thinking, you can transform those Sunday Night Blues into a delightful symphony of relaxation and anticipation for the week ahead.

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  4. Task-Driven Living Is a Form of Self-Deception
  5. Warren Buffett’s Advice on How to Focus on Priorities and Subdue Distractions

How to … Make Work Less Boring

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Time passes faster when you divide a big chunk into lots of smaller chunks. So, if you’re on an inescapably boring path, break it into units. And, for each dreaded task, ask yourself, “What’s the most fun way I could do this?” Work at a coffee shop? Listen to your favorite music? Reward yourself upon its completion?

As Mary Poppins pleaded, “In every task that must be done there is an element of fun. You find the fun and snap! The job’s a game.”

Wondering what to read next?

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  2. Five Ways … You Could Stop Procrastinating
  3. Do You Really Need More Willpower?
  4. How to (Finally!) Stop Procrastinating, Just Do It
  5. How to Turn Your Procrastination Time into Productive Time

Do You Really Need More Willpower?

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Sure, self-discipline is an asset. Plenty of successful people evidently benefit from having truckloads of it. However, strengthening willpower may not always be easy for the rest of us.

You can increase productivity and contentment simply by altering your environment. Make it easier for you (and others in your life) to confront temptation and adopt the habits you want.

Use stimulus control to shift your behavior:

  • Want to stop taking on more debt? Freeze your credit cards.
  • Can’t stop checking your phone for likes, comments, texts, tweets, and game requests? Disable the apps.
  • Want your household to be more organized? Establish routines and make things easy to put away with clearly labeled receptacles.
  • Want to switch to healthier snacking choices? Splurge on pre-washed, pre-cut, grab-and-go vegetables.

You’re more likely to start change when you put the stimulus for action into your environment.

Idea for Impact: Don’t get bogged down by thinking that lifestyle changes are entirely about willpower. In a world so heavily baited with pervasive cues and craving-inducing stimuli, the more you can tweak your environment to better condition yourself into your desired habits, the more likely you are to meet your goals.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Real Ways to Make Habits Stick
  2. Use This Trick to Make Daily Habits Stick This Year
  3. What the Dry January Trap Shows Us About Extremes
  4. An Effective Question to Help Feel the Success Now
  5. Conquer That Initial Friction

Use This Trick to Make Daily Habits Stick This Year

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The best way to catalyze significant change is by relying on highly specific habits and routines and making time for them amid the busyness of life.

Habit formation relies on consistency. Here’s a simple trick to prevent good intentions from slipping.

Suppose that you want to start a daily walking habit. You set a target to go for a walk for at least an hour a day. But some days, this habit might not be doable.

Consistency & Small Habits = Big Results

To prevent slipping on your daily goal and beating yourself up about it, establish two targets: one for the “good” days and one for the “tough” days.

Set the bar very low for when it’s not possible to dedicate an hour to walking. On the tough days, when you’re exhausted, hungry, feeling lazy and unmotivated, or you’re simply not in the mood to walk, you can go for a quick walk. And on good days, when you have more time and energy, go for longer walks. Average out the tough days with the good days.

Make it so easy that you can’t say no to maintaining your habit on the tough days. You’ll decrease your skipped days and sustain the habit’s consistency by lowering your expectations.

Another benefit of having easy-win targets for the tough days is that you nudge yourself into action. Let’s say you target reading an hour a day. On tough days, when you set out to read for just ten minutes, you’ll perhaps get engrossed in more of the task once you get started and find your way into the text. Action begets momentum, and you’ll find it easier to keep going at it.

Idea for Impact: Consistency is the Foundation of Building New Habits

Habits take a long time to create, but they develop faster when you do them more routinely and repeatedly. The more days you skip, the harder it is to get back into the habit. Set the bar low for the tough days and build deep-seated habits.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. What the Dry January Trap Shows Us About Extremes
  2. If Stuck, Propel Forward with a ‘Friction Audit’
  3. Resolution Reboot: February’s Your Fresh Start
  4. The #1 Hack to Build Healthy Habits in the New Year
  5. Don’t Try to ‘Make Up’ for a Missed Workout, Here’s Why

Get Good At Things By Being Bad First

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Your first attempts are going to be bad

A technique used by many a brilliant inventor:

  • Make something. Get it functional. Get it adequate. It’s okay if it’s subpar.
  • Then, stumble around. Iterate until it’s good.

Now, that’s a better creative process than making something good on the first go.

Start, even if you’re bad at it

Case in point: Write bad first drafts quickly. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. Let it all pour out. Let it romp all over the place. No one’s going to see it. You can shape it up later. You can gradually polish the thought flow and enrich the choice of words.

If you aren’t willing to be bad initially, you’ll never get started on anything new.

It’s vastly easier to revise your way into a cut above than drum up brilliance out of thin air.

The way you create something good is by launching into it and then iterating gradually rather than by going into your cave and trying to create that perfect masterpiece.

Essentially, this is agile development. The best programmers write functional code to prove some concept. Along the way, they’ll get a better understanding of the business need for the software and the workflow. Bit by bit, they rework snippets of code and improve continuously.

Idea for Impact: Just start. Do a bad first job.

The bad is the precursor to the good. Bad will get you started. It’ll move you forward. Pressing on, you’ll get illuminated, enlightened, and informed.

Momentum is everything. Don’t put off any contemplated task thinking, “This is hard. I don’t know how to do this well. I’m going to have to do it perfectly. Or I need to wait till I have enough time.” The instant you stop cold and put something off, momentum starts the other way.

Motivation is often the result of an action, not its cause. Taking action—even in small, sloppy ways—naturally produces momentum. It’s a better solution than trying to do it right the first time.

Wondering what to read next?

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  2. An Effective Question to Help Feel the Success Now
  3. Just Start with ONE THING
  4. Why Doing a Terrible Job First Actually Works
  5. Do Things Fast