New Year's Resolutions: Success, Failures, and Realistic Goals

If you’ve ever “resolved” to do something you don’t actually do anyway—like me heroically giving up Diet Coke despite never drinking it—congrats, you’ve discovered the hack. Pick a layup, feel like a winner, move on. But the first couple weeks of a new year are also when the real conversation shows up: why do the big, honest resolutions stall out so fast?

Here’s my working theory from a messy start to 2025 (complete with airplane germs and a lovingly blameless toddler): most resolutions are vitamins, not aspirin. They make us feel proactive, but they don’t treat any actual pain in our process. Much like some meetings—held to relieve stress more than produce outcomes—resolutions can be soothing theater.

Toby and I joked about “no squid” and “no pickled herring” policies, but the deeper confession is this: I’ve avoided resolutions because I don’t like failing in public. If you’re already failing at 10 little things a day, why add a banner headline called “Resolution” you can fail at too?

That’s the turn for me this year. I’m trading “resolutions” for “practice.”

Think about what we see on the field versus what we never see: reps. Coaches don’t call a play that their quarterback hasn’t practiced. Knowledge work is no different. We judge ourselves on game film (deadline week, board prep, client fire drills) instead of on the reps that make those moments clean and boring. So instead of promising outcomes, I’m committing to a cadence:

Daily practice: capture three wins. Not a task list. Not aspirational fluff. Three real, observable wins I can point to at day’s end. It rewires my brain from “What did I miss?” to “What did I move?”

Weekly practice: send a short status to stakeholders—what moved last week, what’s coming this week, what’s blocked. It’s five minutes to publish clarity. Bonus: it invites course correction while it’s still cheap.

Monthly practice: set (and review) the handful of things that matter this month. Then let the weeklies roll up and the dailies roll in. If it’s not in the monthly, it’s probably noise.

Under the hood, this is the same process frame we use with clients: Prescriptive → Ritual → Report.

• Prescriptive: define the behavior (e.g., “three daily wins,” “Friday status”).

• Ritual: define the cadence (daily, weekly, monthly).

• Report: define the proof (the actual note sent, the doc updated, the comment logged).

That “report” piece matters. It’s the difference between motion and measurement. A meeting that exists only to reduce anxiety creates process debt—hidden cost with no asset on the other side. A status note with dates, decisions, and next steps? That’s an asset. It pays dividends in alignment, trust, and fewer interruptions.

Two more rules that keep the debt down:

1. Stay inside your control. Don’t build a resolution around a kitchen you don’t run or a roadmap you don’t own. Practice the pieces you can actually do.

2. Match effort to appetite. If your team (or boss) doesn’t care yet, don’t burn political capital forcing vitamins. Do the tiny aspirin that makes their life obviously better—like the weekly “here’s what happened, here’s what’s next.”

I don’t know if 2025 will be spectacular. But I know how to keep it fair-to-midland and trending up: practice the reps that make the game boring.

Process Debt Truth: Organizations don’t drown in what they can’t plan—they drown in what they won’t practice.