For as long as I can remember, I’ve never been ready to make resolutions come January 1st.  I’ve worked as hard as I can through to December the 20-something and then just collapsed for ten days to take a break at the one time of year when I know I’ll generally be uninterrupted.  Of course I make plans to prepare for the New Year however before I know it it’s the day before the big ‘back to work’ and I’m in the exact same position I was on December the 20-something.

2009 is no different.  I’ll be back in the studio tomorrow with a reasonable amount of project work to complete including some 2008 hangovers.  On top of that I’m sure that there are numerouse clients even as I write who are formulating To Do lists for the New Year that feature me prominently.  For many people in a time of economic uncertainty they would view this as positive however I always like to remember that every silver lining has a cloud.  In this case, if 2009 is anything like 2006, 2007 and 2008 I’ll look up and realise that it’s June already and my big plans and ambitions for the year are still on the starting line.

So this year instead of New Year’s Resolutions I’m going to adopt David Seah‘s concept of Groundhog Day Resolutions – whereby resolutions are made on Groundhog Day – the second day of the second month – and then reviewed on the third day of the third month, the fourth day of the fourth month and so on.  The full details of how it works and when resolutions are reviewed can be found over on David’s site.

David neatly summarises the problem of making New Year’s Resolutions as this:

I don’t have an issue with the resolutions themselves, but they have suffered from being overexposed in popular culture. Because of that, they’ve lost the impact that they should have. Everyone expects people to make—and then forget—their New Year’s Resolutions, which leads to the more cynical among us to stop making them. Ubiquitious and cliched, making a New Year’s Resolution takes about the same level of personal investment as ordering the #1 combo at McDonalds.

There’s a second problem: The timing of New Year’s Resolutions are out of synch with the realities of our daily routine. While it makes sense to make New Year’s Resolutions on January 1st as to maximize the time to act on them, the beginning of the year is also the time when you are most mentally exhausted. Think about it: you’ve just survived another massive holiday season of eating, travelling, drinking, gift buying, and celebration. On top of that, there’s all the stuff that you were hurrying to finish last year that got put off until now. The first month of the year is so packed with catch-up activities, who has the time to think about resolutions?

I figure you need at least a few weeks to settle into the year before you even have the big picture necessary to target a few things to do. So I’m moving my New Year’s Resolutions to Groundhog Day, one month and one day past January 1st.

He’s right on the money – it’s easy to make resolutions like losing weight, exercising more, starting a new project etc but without some real consideration as to what these resolutions mean and how they can be achieved they’ll likely have failed before you’ve even got started.  So this year I’ll be taking my time over the first four weeks of the year to mentally prune the list of goals I would like to achieve in to those which are realistic, worthwhile and achievable in 2009 and then come Groundhog Day I’ll be committing the list here and following up each month to review my progress.

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