How to keep up with your New Year's resolutions

 

First and foremost, I would like to highlight the fundamental difference between a goal and a resolution. While goals pertain to a specific objective, resolutions relate to life's trajectory, that is, they are broad. For this article, we will focus on goals rather than resolutions. 

 

One of the keys to succeeding in your 2020 goals is in understanding Parkinsons Law: "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." In general, people allocate a task to the intirety of the time available to complete it.  The first graph portrays this phenomenon: people dedicate a lot of time to their goals, in the beginning, gradually losing interest and, consequently, procrastinating till the task's time of completion. The opposite of this phenomenon is students with assignments, where most effort is towards the deadline (second graph). The secret in succeeding is, then, in your ability to exploit this law by decreasing the time available to complete your goals. 

 

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Apart from constraining your time to complete goals, research suggests that reminding yourself of the bigger picture has positive effects on your success. In other words, this pertains to you vividly reminding yourself of the reasons why you chose the goals instead of the goals themselves. Human beings tend to override critical thinking and long term fulfilment for short term pleasure and emotion. Therefore, through vivid imagery, we can invoke emotion strong enough to override procrastination.