I've been thinking about New Year's resolutions today.

The last couple years I've been big into resolutions on New Year's Eve, but I haven't done anything so far this year because 2020 was such a shitshow I couldn't even.

1/n

So then I binged on the #lemonpig hashtag on NYE and New Year's day and a bit yesterday too and my mood has improved, so I'm back on my resolutions bullshit.

(Thanks lemon pig twitter! <3)

2/n

Anyway, to go back to the beginning, in 2018 I made some resolutions at the end of the year, as one does, and gradually forgot about them during the course of the year, as one does.

3/n

Somewhere around the end of December 2018 I saw an article about the statistics of New Year's resolutions, and how really only 8-10% of resolutions are kept.

So, I thought, if I want to improve my probability of resolution completion I just need to make MORE resolutions.

4/n

Having just remembered those resolutions from the previous New Year's eve for the first time in months this seemed sensible.

At 10% chance per resolution, I decide, if I make 10 resolutions I should be able to keep at least one of them alive for the entire year.

5/n

Reading a few more articles to gather more resolution completion stats I find numbers as low as 2% so I'm rethinking 10 and decide to go big and shoot for 100, then even if it's 1% I'll get at least 1 done.

6/n

(Note that I realize this is bad stats and bad organizational, motivational etc, etc)

So now I have the problem of coming up with 100 New Year's resolutions, and it's only a couple of days before the end of the year, and long story short I end up with 50 on Jan. 1, 2018.

7/n

I added one more later that day for a total of 51 resolutions to work on in 2018.

I discover there's a lot of bookkeeping and organization around tracking and updating 51 inspirational life-changing resolutions. A project management problem.

I make lists.

8/n

Lists of lists, calendars, and schedules. The first couple weeks of January involved a lot of planning around this.

It was all highly motivational.

At the end of 2019 the score is 28 out of 50 kept.

Success! I beat the spread! I only cheated a lot!

9/n

A key realization was that a resolution is what I say it is.

So "Find that worry stone I used to like to fiddle with and haven't seen for a while" (#30 on the list) is a perfectly OK resolution (I found it!)

About half of my completed resolutions looked like this.

10/n

These are more like to-do items or reminders than resolutions per se but they help pad out the list, are relatively easy, and motivate me to keep reviewing the list for easy wins, which keeps the long term goals fresh in my mind.

11/n

Considering the success of the project in 2019, I had high hopes for the coming year (sweet summer child) and got 61 resolutions listed out in preparation for NYE 2020. Made my lists, schedules, calendar and of course ran headlong into the pandemic.

12/n

So I just checked and I kept 13 out of 61 for 2020, not bad considering I haven't looked at them since March.

Some of them were these to-do items which were salient enough that they got done anyway, and others are good habits I developed in 2019 and was just continuing.

13/n

So anyway looking at the project in 2021 it seems like a win, and I bashed out a list 93 resolutions tonight, carrying many over from 2019 and 2020, and adding a bunch of easy wins and other stuff.

Highly motivated to make 2021 a better year than 2020.

14/15

I'll add 7 more tomorrow to get the total to 100 this year and start the lists and schedules.

If there's a moral in this it's that taking a considered look at your life is worthwhile and even if the frame is stupid and ad hoc it can produce meaningful results.

Happy New Year.

Well I'm bad at twitter and time travel is complicated so here's the errata for this thread:

3/ start of the year, not end
7/ Jan 1 2019, not 2018
8/ 2019, not 2018
15/ didn't put 15/15

16/15 (the numbers, they do not add up!)

thanks for reading