New Year's Resolutions: Valuing quality over quantity

Changing how we think about resolutions and goals.

This time of year, we often hear others talk about their exercise goals, productivity visions and desire to improve something in their lives, otherwise known as New Year’s Resolutions. But these annual conversations often fall short of materializing as we envision when the calendar turns from December to January.

A Statista survey published in November found that one in five people said they stuck to some of the resolutions they made for 2022, while 11 percent said they did not. Others surveyed either can’t remember their resolutions or didn’t make any. Nonetheless, what makes a resolution easier or harder to maintain? Is it the resolution itself or is it the willpower of the individual?

It’s both; like everything, it’s gray. But debating whether it’s the individual or the resolution misses a larger point: that we create resolutions that are often too large and too rigid to be sustained. We swing for the fences, as if we can make these drastic changes to our lives in a moment’s notice, as if there is a major difference between December 31 and January 1. 

What if we changed how we thought about our resolutions and the methods we use to try to improve our quality of life? In other words, what if we focused on quality rather than quantity?

Let’s take the gym and productivity resolutions as examples: they are lifestyle changes that have depth and that require time, effort and planning. They often have numbers attached to them, like “I’m going to lose 50 pounds” or “I’m going to write 75 articles,” and that’s theoretically a way to hold ourselves accountable, but it also creates a rigid binary.

With those goals, we tell ourselves we are going to do something in the future, but when the future becomes the present, those goals, typically unreasonably large to begin with, begin to evolve and dissolve. And after the cycle repeats itself a few times, we decide our lives are good enough as is.  

But as the old saying goes, more is not always better. Numbers help to measure progress, but it is difficult to measure depth through quantitative goals or resolutions. I would rather write 40 solid columns or blog posts each year than 80 mediocre pieces that I will look back on with regret.

Lastly, we don’t have the ability to see or control the future. We don’t know what’s coming; we can only control the moment and how we react to what is directly in front of us, based on the past. It’s important to prepare for the future to hopefully achieve our goals, but to sacrifice the quality of our work in order to do more work is irresponsible.