How to Fulfill Your 2020 Resolution in the Rest of the Year.
There is still a lot of time that you can spend to reach your target in 2020.
It’s already in September. Never realize this year is running so fast. 2020 will be finished in less than 4 months.
I still have a lot of things that I want to do in 2020. It still remains on my note as a yearly resolution. The yearly resolution, it is such overrated words that commonly use to make a new hope for us to become a better person and achieve the things that we want to be. However, 80% of people fail to fulfill their yearly resolution. I am included in this 80% sadly.
But being stay at home and working from home for a couple of quarters, make me re-think my resolution. I have more of the time that I never have before which I can use to make more effort to fulfill it. In the spirit of making it comes true, I change my perspective and adapt the things that I learn from my working experience to reach the goal on a personal level.
I tweak my old way and try to change the way to achieve my resolution with these steps.
Ask Why
Maybe you’re too excited to celebrate the new era and you put a lot of things in your resolution and bucket lists. Before you put this too many, start to ask why you want to have this kind of resolution. Let’s say if you want to acquire a new skill such as: learn to code this year. You need to ask yourself, Why I Want to Do This? Is this give another value to my future self? Asking why your self is important to maintain your motivation and remind you what is the thing that really drives to have and do this specific resolution. This also helps you to filter as well as prioritize your resolutions which is make your list become more narrow. This leads us to the second point, which is
Prioritize
One of the quotes that really into me in 2020 is from Warren Buffet which is
Make a list of the top 25 things you want to do in life. Now do the top 5. And never ever again think about the other 20 again.
I’m not as strict as that quote. I keep maintain and consider the rest of the resolution but just put in lower prioritization (P2, P3)
Like I mentioned in another post, prioritization helps you focus to achieve your objectives.
One of the mistakes that I did is I put a lot of things that come across my mind to my resolution list. Unfortunately, this led me to confusion like what are the things that I need to do first? what is the thing that I need to achieve first? Should I do all of this in parallel?. Even though you decide to do these in a parallel way, you may hardly to achieve one of them when you put too much resolution.
I still have a lot of things in my bucket list but I prioritize three resolutions as my goal. When it comes to prioritization, you may consider these factors as guidance:
- Impact on your life (short/long term)
- Effort needed
- Estimated completion time
I focus on three items that give a long term impact on my plan that need a lot of effort and time to accomplish. This because it will take a long time to do and will consume your time, possibly throughout a year. The second comes to activity that has a long term impact but doesn’t take a long time to finish it.
Quantify the Goal
Let’s say you have the resolution to lose bodyweight. After you determine that resolution, the next process is to quantify your goal. For the case of losing weight, you may state the target in the number, such as: “I want to lose 5 kg”. This helps you to track and monitor your progress. So if you feel that you’re still far from your target, you can put more effort or change the way that you’re used to doing. More importantly, quantify the goal give you two things: motivation and clarity. Motivation to push you to consistent with your target and clarity to give you a signal when you need to push or stop and appreciate your effort.
Chunk It to Action Items
After determining the items and quantified targets, now you should know what is the next step that you need to do. Let’s say, you want to able to speak a new language at a conversational level at the end of the year. You may divide this into several milestones such as: learn how to do basic introduction and conversation, simple grammar, vocabulary group A, and others.
This will help you to have a clear direction about how to achieve your target. The mistake that I created before that I didn’t define this milestone. It led me to confusion and loss of focus for reaching my resolution. Additionally, sometimes it is easier to take a couple of small steps rather than one big step. With this, you can directly execute your action in a shorter time.
Personally, if I can accomplish this small milestone, I also feel rewarded for achieving something. Rather than you just put your way directly to the end goal without dividing it to sub-goal, you appreciate less about what you’ve done.
Spread it as Weekly/Monthly Milestone
To keep you always motivate, spread this milestone on a weekly or monthly basis. This allows you to push yourself every week to have progressed to achieve your resolution. On the other hand, if you can push yourself to do it, you can reward yourself on a weekly or monthly basis.
Monitor the Progress
This is the crucial thing. Monitoring the progress will remind you about how far or how close you are to your goal. You may monitor and record your progress on a weekly or monthly basis. When recording the progress, you can use the percentage of achievement, which is your current achievement compared to the target, to know how close you are to your target.
While I’m working in my previous company, there always be a thing called yearly OKR (Objective and Key Result). This OKR will be broken down to Quarterly OKR and cascade to a monthly goal.
Yet, this concept is common in the organization, I try to implement it on a personal level. I found the article in Medium on how to create personal OKR, implement it, as well as monitor it. In this article, the writer also put his OKR template that can be used as a reference to monitor your progress.
Takeaways
Indirectly, this causes me to create a personal system to achieve my resolution, starts from planning, executing, and monitoring. Slowly, I make progress in several parts of my resolution and I feel proud that I can achieve something that comes closer to my target. Hopefully, this system can also work for you as well to fulfill your resolutions within these 4 months.
