"New year, new me". To be honest I'm not really in to the whole idea of waiting until new year to change but these arbitrary dates such as new years, birthdays, and anniversaries do offer us a good point to reflect, plan and adjust. The challenge though is that so many people get it wrong and simply end up failing within weeks or perhaps months at most.
It's not that people lack motivation or will power it's more that our objectives are wrong to start with.
Let's take a common new year's resolution: "I'm going to get fit and healthy." We all know that this isn't an objective. There's no way to measure your progress and ultimate success, there's no timescale, and is it even realistic? So let's make it a bit smarter. "I will have a body fat percentage of no more than 15% by 1st July so that I look great in my summer holiday pictures". Better, but still not an objective. This, I would argue, is a vision not an objective. Our vision is where we want to be, and our objectives are how we will get there. Our objectives build towards our vision.
The best way to come up with our personal objectives is to look at our vision, where we are now, and figure out what steps we need to take on a, I would suggest monthly basis, to get there.
Sticking with our example then, let's say we're currently at 20% body fat and don't really exercise much beyond the odd family walk at the weekend. If we just had "get to 15% body fat by July" as our objective we would likely rush out the door and try running 5k every day, or go to the gym 6 days/week, spend £100s on a Personal Trainer, throw out all 'unhealthy' food, and end up burning out and quitting after a month or two.
Thinking about our objectives as steps towards our vision though we take a very different approach.
We know that to lose fat calories in must be lower than calories out. So in our first month we might have just two simple objectives. Firstly, "log all meals every day using MyFitness Pal", and secondly, "do 30 minutes of light exercise twice per week at lunch time rather than watching television". We're now starting to form useful habits: tracking our calorie intake and doing some regular exercise. In our second month we can start to ramp up a bit. We might add some objectives such as "consume no more than 2,000 calories per day" which is now a lot easier as we know how many we usually consume and we're in the habit of tracking it, do "30 minutes of walking 2 times per week at lunch time" and "online exercise classes 2 times per week straight after work". In our third month we add some more objectives, join the gym, see a Personal Trainer once per week, workout at the gym 4 days per week, consume no more than 1,800 calories per day... I think you get the picture at this stage.
(And by the way I'm not a fitness expert so please don't take these objectives as anything other than a random example).
You'll notice that in our objectives we're also trying to set good habits, the additional words of 'straight after work" and "at lunch instead of watching television" all help to get rid of old bad habits and replace them with new good habits that actually help achieve our objectives. I'd recommend reading Atomic Habits by James Clear for some brilliant tips on setting good habits.
It's useful to set these objectives all in one go, at the start of the year. This is a good opportunity to plan and set out the roadmap. It's important to remember though that they're flexible and we must adjust them as we go. There's no point having an objective of doing 5 days of exercise per week in month 4 if we actually gained an injury in month 3 that prevents us doing that. In this case we simply change the month 4 objective to something more like "complete mandated physio exercises every day". Life always changes, it's never going to work out exactly how we think at the start of the year.
Objectives must always be realistic. Don't set your first month objectives to be life altering, if you've hardly ever exercised before you're not going to suddenly be running 5km every day. The whole point of thinking about objectives in this way is that they build up to our vision, we don't hit our vision on day 1.
Similarly, objectives should be challenging but not impossible. They must take us out of our comfort zone and engage us but should not be anxiety inducing. Humans develop and grow best when we're just outside of our comfort zone.
Tracking against our objectives is really important. Personally, I use Notion which has some great templates to get started, I use the habit tracker for day-to-day tracking and the roadmap for objective setting, putting each objective in to monthly columns so I can see at a glance how the objectives build each month towards the vision. Trello is another great tool for this, and it's super easy to use. I also like the 'Don't break the chain' method.
Remember, objectives get us to our vision, they aren't our end state, they must take us just out of our comfort zone, be flexible, and make us replace bad habits with good ones.