Crushing Your New Year's Goals

It’s a New Year! Or almost a New Year depending on when you're reading this. So Happy New Year to you, dear reader or happy almost New Year! A new year means it’s time to start setting your goals and crushing them! You’ve got the extra motivation to get it done and you want to start the year off right and productive. Often you hear convictions of people saying they don’t believe in new years resolutions or they’re not into setting goals. That’s fine if that works for you. I believe New Year’s Day marks a new beginning and it’s a mental fresh start to accomplish your goals. Let’s go through some ways you can maximize your abilities to achieve those goals.

Writing Your Goals Down

Before the new year starts, I write down all of the goals I wish to accomplish. I either grab a notebook or use Google Sheets and mark down all the goals I wish to achieve in the New Year. Depending on the goal, I usually set up more “mini” goals.

Mini Goals

A mini goal is a smaller goal that helps you progress to completing the main goal. As an example, if my goal was to lose 30lbs this year, I would make a goal to lose 2lbs in the next 2-3 weeks. I would keep building upon that until I’ve lost the 30lbs. I personally do this with weight lifting. My goal for this year is to hit a 400lb deadlift. I’m going to try reaching small PRs(personal records) throughout the year until I meet my goal. Using this technique also helps because it guides you from getting discouraged and allows you to stay focused and on track.

Logging Your Days

It’s easy to be bombarded with tasks to do throughout the day. You may not get a chance to be as productive as you want to be. Maybe you forgot to complete tasks that you were supposed to do simply because you were too busy or it wasn’t on your mind. To fix this, you should start logging your days.

What I mean by logging, is keeping track of everything did for the day as well as seeing what still needs to be done. This is a bit different from just making a task list of things you wish to get done throughout the day. The reason being is that when you log everything you do throughout the day you can start to see where you have or don’t have free time. You can also see if you’re giving yourself too many tasks. This is extremely beneficial because you will know just how busy you are, where you have free time to get certain tasks done, and you can see if you need to scale yourself back and give yourself more free time.

In terms of fitness, you can use this technique more in-depth. In addition to just logging your days, you can also be logging your food intake and your weight lifting/cardio progress. You’ll be able to see if you’re eating too much or too little. You’ll get a gauge of how strong you’re getting or if you’re plateauing. I track my workouts and my food intake daily and it’s helped me progress in tremendous ways.

Ask Yourself One Question

I like to ask myself this one question every day, and that is “Am I one step closer to reaching my goals?” It’s a question to see if I’m headed in the right direction or am I falling behind. It’s a way for me to summarize my day and say to myself “Great, keep doing what you’re doing” or, “Alright, I gotta get myself back on track tomorrow.” I like this question because it puts things into perspective. If things aren’t going right, I’ll check my logs and do some time management rearrangement to see where I’m able to fit in extra tasks.

Get Disciplined

If this isn’t already on your list of goals, I would add “get disciplined”. Being more disciplined in your own life will help you take better control of yourself and your goals. You’ll notice that you’ll get more done and you’ll be completing more goals. To read more, check out this article I wrote Forget Motivation, Get Disciplined. I also recommend, checking out Discipline Equals Freedom by Jocko Willink.

Final Thoughts

New Year's resolutions are great to set. It’s a great way to set new goals and challenges for yourself for the upcoming year. The problem usually lies within following up with these goals. All the tips I’ve mentioned above have helped me to achieve my goals at exceptional rates of time. These tips don’t have to be applied to just fitness goals either, you can use them for pretty much anything. Keep track of your goals, keep yourself inline, and be honest with yourself on where you might be slacking and where you need to fix it. Go crush your goals!