The Edit: New year, new you?

Plus: A glitter exposé. View in [Browser]( | Add nytdirect@nytimes.com to your address book. [The New York Times]( [The New York Times]( Thursday, December 27, 2018 [NYTimes.com »]( George Wylesol New Year, New You? How to Set Resolutions That You Can Actually Achieve [Nushrat Rahman] Nushrat Rahman Contributor to The Edit It’s the most wonderful time of the year, or something. The holidays are coming to a close and we’re confronted with that question that turns up around this time: What do I want to change in the next year? Setting New Year’s resolutions can be a pretty daunting task, and even more so when [statistics say that a vast majority of us fail in our attempts](. But choosing the right goals and creating a solid plan can [keep you on track](. [Omar Pablo]( and I talked to Tim Herrera, editor of Smarter Living, about goal setting, habit building and the importance of carving out time for laziness. Nushrat: Why do we all seem to set goals around this time in the first place? Tim: It’s an arbitrary resetting date. From a practical sense, it doesn’t really mean anything. It’s kind of silly, but I think any time that gives us a convenient excuse to re-evaluate where we are in life is great. Nushrat: Yeah, that makes sense. I guess when I think about it, a lot of people live by their planners, like I do. Throughout the year, I use Sunday to figure out what I’m going to do for the rest of the week. So, on a larger scale, doing that for the next year can be helpful too. Tim: Right. One of the weird things about adulthood is that after you graduate from college, you never really have another stage where you, and everyone around you, are evaluating things in life. There’s never a collective occasion to set a goal, but New Year’s provides a very convenient excuse to have those conversations with yourself and people you know. Everyone likes to trash New Year’s and talk about how silly resolutions are, but for a lot of people it does help. Whatever works is great. Nushrat: What would you say are the best ways to set goals? Tim: I think it’s important to recognize a couple of reasons we fail at goals in the first place, because I think the answer to setting good goals is buried in that. We usually set one or two goals, neither of which has a very good chance of success. You might be setting goals that are completely unreasonable and unattainable. These are the kinds of goals that even in the absolute best conditions and best-case scenarios, you’re not going to achieve. For example: Wanting to lose 100 pounds or write a book are both great resolutions, but are they realistic? Setting unreasonable goals is a simple way of setting yourself up for failure. The other way we set ourselves up for failure is by trying to have goals that we don’t really believe in. A lot of the time, these take the form of goals that we think society says we should set, like trying to run 20 miles a week. I think being really, really honest and realistic with ourselves about the goals we’re setting is the best thing we can do to actually succeed. Once we have the ideas in mind about what we want to achieve, change or quit, there are practical steps you can take within that goal to maximize your chances for success. One method I’ve heard a lot about is [SMART]( goals. The acronym stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound. Start with “specific,” which refers to concrete, clearly defined goals. Instead of saying you want to write a book this year, say you want to write one chapter every month with a certain word count you’re going to hit weekly. This way, you still have your broad goal of writing the book, but you also have (much) smaller doses of success along the road, and also a road map of how to achieve the larger goal. Then, you have “measurable." Whatever your goal is, you’re going to have ways to measure the progress you’re making. Sticking with the book example, writing 2,000 words a week is a goal in itself. Those small things add up. There’s a lot of research that says “success begets success.” If you think you’ve achieved a certain goal, it can make you more likely to stick with it so you keep achieving goals and getting that reward loop going. Next, “achievable.” You want to aim high but within reason. Writing a book is probably a stretch goal for anyone, but if you have a plan, it can be within reason. If you say you want to become a novelist this year, that’s probably an unreasonable goal. But writing a book is a little more reasonable. After that, you want to have a “relevant” goal. Back to what I was saying about setting goals that you actually care about rather than things you think you should care about or things you’re arbitrarily setting just to have a goal. And, at last, the “T” is, for me, probably the most important: Have a timeline. Saying you want to write a book this year is great, but if you don’t have a timeline with specific dates and deadlines, and things that you should have achieved by those dates, you’re just setting yourself up for failure. Nushrat: SMART goals are great because they break down your goals — which often can seem so massive and unachievable — into bite-size pieces. I’m always very lofty with my goal setting and one thing I’ve tried and found really beneficial is having an accountability buddy. Last year I wanted to focus on my writing, so I asked a friend to help me make sure I was keeping at it. We would text each other at the end of the week to make sure that we had done what we intended to. Tim: Having that kind of support system is very important: friends and people in your life who are going to call you out when you’re slacking or reach out to you when you’re not feeling great. But there are a lot of things that you can do internally to help you stay motivated. One is being really accepting of yourself when you’ve failed and when you slip up. When we drop the ball on a couple of mini goals, we’re going to think, “I’ve failed enough already so I should just give up.” But failing and slipping up is part of the process. Research has shown that if you set a goal with the explicit acknowledgment that you’re going to fail a bunch of times, it makes it a whole lot easier to accept and deal with those failures when they happen. One other thing that can help a lot internally is trying not to get too swept up into too much positive thinking. It may sound counterintuitive, but a study showed that a lot of times when people think about resolutions and goals they tend to confuse optimism and positive thinking with achievement. You want to make sure that while you’re staying positive and optimistic, you’re not losing sight of the things that you’re actually trying to obtain and achieve. Try to stay positive, but realistic. Omar: There seems to be a capitalist mind-set behind the making of New Year’s resolutions. We’re usually making goals that are related to work or being more efficient. Do you think the practice of making resolutions is kind of outdated? Tim: I think people want to set resolutions for New Year’s because it’s convenient for them, but yes, we should acknowledge that there is this weird cultural and societal pressure: New year, new me. There’s this implicit pressure that we all are obligated to set a goal for self-improvement, and become better or different people in the coming year. For a lot of people it does work, and it can be good motivation. But it’s unhealthy to go into the new year with the assumption that you’re lacking in something, or that you need to change. I don’t think there’s any right or wrong resolution to set. I also don’t think it is right or wrong to even set a resolution in the first place. Omar: Would you recommend this kind of reflection to young professionals and college students, particularly at this time of the year? Tim: Setting habits around things that you want to achieve is the only way that you’ll achieve anything. There’s an amazing book by a former New York Times reporter named Charles Duhigg called “[The Power of Habit.]( He asserts that we need to set routines and habits that are going to most benefit us but that can replace the routines and habits that we want to do away with. In a famous example he uses in his book, he noticed that he’d put on 15 or 10 pounds in a year and he couldn’t really figure out why. Then he noticed that he had a habit of getting up every afternoon and walking around the office to socialize with his co-workers, but he would always buy a cookie. He had a daily cookie habit. He wanted to replace that habit. What he did was establish the social satisfaction of talking with his co-workers and getting up and walking around as a reward. Habits and routines are crucial to achieving goals and resolutions. So you have to figure out ways to build habits around the things that you want to achieve. For example, if your goal is to run more this year, when you get home after work, instead of taking off your shoes and sitting on the couch to rest for a minute before you go run, you could change into your running gear and get straight back out. Eventually, if you do that consistently enough, it will build a habit. It will become second nature and you won’t have to think about it. You’ll just get home, change into your running gear, and get out running. That is really key to building strong habits: You want to take decision making out of the equation so you just start doing the thing you want to do rather than having to make the decision to do it. Omar: That’s smart. What resolutions would you recommend to people early in their careers? Tim: That is difficult to answer because I think resolutions and goals are so personal and specific. But I can tell you that for me, one of my resolutions this year is to finish writing a book. So the plan is, when I wake up, I can check Instagram or whatever, but afterward I want to sit down and write for 30 minutes every single morning. Something that works for me in my day job is to set aside a certain time around the same time of day when I know that I’m going to be writing. I want to translate that idea and thinking into creating a habit of writing 30 minutes every morning no matter what. The goal for that is that I’ll wake up and know I have 10 minutes to check Instagram and then it’s time to write for half an hour. Nushrat: For a long time, I was really productivity focused — I needed to fill up my whole day with getting as much work done as possible. But in the last couple of months, especially after graduating, I’ve focused on setting different types of goals. For example, I wanted to spend more time with my little brother and sister and my mom, and even making an effort to talk to my teenage brother. It’s a different kind of pressure than spending one hour every day doing grad school stuff, but I think both of those things are equally important. Tim: I totally agree. It’s so easy to get zeroed in on traditional types of resolutions and goal setting. Even in popular media, everyone says the same New Year’s resolutions: quit smoking, lose 50 pounds, go out running more. Setting a goal to spend more time talking to your siblings isn’t one of these classic New Year’s resolutions. But it matters to you and that’s the only thing that’s important. Nushrat: You’ve written about giving yourself [a complete day off and not doing anything](. I graduated in May and I started a full-time internship. Then that internship ended and I find that I don’t know what to do with my time. I’m trying to give myself permission to not be too busy and not do anything. Tim: I remember being that age. You enter this spiral where you feel you have so many things you have to figure out, so you can lose sight that it is also important to just live. Being deliberate and specific about carving out laziness time in your schedule is a really important way to keep your sanity after graduation. Taking a couple of nights off is just as important for your overall development and productivity as job hunting and searching for internships. If you’re not allowing yourself time to decompress and regain energy, you’re going to burn out. The worst thing for productivity and getting things done is burnout. A lot of times, busy stuff is not productivity, it’s just busy work. That’s time that could have been better spent relaxing and seeing friends or watching TV or sitting around with a book. Nushrat: That is so reassuring to hear. I spend a lot of time worrying about the future, and that takes up so much brain energy. Tim: 100 percent. A lot of the times those blank spaces in our calendars can be the places where we find the most inspiration. I get many of my best ideas for work when I’m hanging out at home, chilling on the weekend, or in the shower. It’s not a matter of thinking of that time as lazy time. It’s recovery and recuperation time that can make you better at the things that you want to be working at or that you want to be productive around. Omar: Here in Mexico we have this tradition of eating one grape per bell toll at midnight on New Year’s Eve, so you have 12 wishes or goals for the next year. It’s a nice idea, but I don’t think that’s how my mind works. I think I prefer to just go with the flow. If something comes up, I like to just tackle it and then move on instead of having these 12 huge plans at the beginning of the year. Maybe it would be better to have two, or even one big specific goal. It does not have to be major, just major to me. Tim: Yes, you can have those huge, lofty, big goals, but you should remember to break those goals down into mini goals and achievements so you can celebrate your wins along the way to achieving that huge, monumental goal. I think is very important to get really comfortable with failure and understanding that failure is part of the process, and not a setback. You learn so much more from failures than when you get things right. HOW ARE WE DOING? We’d love your feedback on this newsletter. Please email thoughts and suggestions to [the edit@nytimes.com](mailto:theedit@nytimes.com?subject=The%20Edit%20Newsletter%20Feedback). LIKE THIS EMAIL? Forward it to your friends, and let them know they can sign up [here](. ADVERTISEMENT What We’re Reading [Ah, the shimmer of aluminum metalized polyethylene terephthalate.]( Chris Maggio for The New York Times [What Is Glitter?]( By CAITY WEAVER A strange journey to the glitter factory. 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