This New Year, Commit to Five Minutes a Day

Why I’m Not a Big Fan Of New Year’s Resolutions

Come January first, many people will be making all sorts of resolutions to be kinder, nobler, healthier, more moral people.  Come February first, almost half of those resolutions will already be broken. I know you all have probably seen those statistics about how almost no one sticks with their New Year’s resolutions, but here it is again: 23% of U.S. adults who make resolutions quit by the end of the first week of January, 43% have quit by the end of January, and only 9% stick with their resolutions until the end of the year.

So, the biggest reason I’m not a fan of New Year’s resolutions is that, statistically speaking, they usually don’t work.  

Why don’t they work?  I’m sure there are many reasons, but I suspect that two of the biggest reasons are that the goals people set are too difficult and too vague.  What’s the antidote to goals that are too difficult and too vague?  Goals which are as easy and as specific as possible.  Goals which are so easy and specific, in fact, that you can accomplish them in five minutes a day.

Make Your Goals More Specific Than You Think You Need To

Let’s say your goal is to lose weight.  If you lose three pounds all year, then you’ll have technically met your goal – but was that what you meant when you set the goal?  Probably not.  Let’s say that your goal is to be more grateful.  How will you know if you’ve met that goal?  You can’t step on the scale and see how many pounds of gratitude you’ve gained since last month.  

Those goals are both too vague.  If a goal is vague, you won’t know when you have achieved it.  There are two big downsides to that.  For one thing, if you don’t know if you have achieved your goal, you won’t know when it is time to set a new goal.  It’s why you can spend years spinning your wheels on a goal like losing weight or exercising more.  If you never know when you’ve hit the old goal, how do you know when the time has come to set a new one?

Furthermore, you get a boost of motivation when you accomplish a goal, which makes you feel confident and excited and want to tackle another goal.  What if your goal is so vague that you never know when you hit it?  Then you never get that boost of motivation, and it feels like you’re just slogging away at the same goals forever with nothing to show for it.  That’s no fun.

The solution?  Make your goals as specific as possible.  That way, you actually know when your goal is accomplished (or not).  You constantly get feedback – if you finish the goal quickly and easily, that’s great! Time to set a new goal.  If not, maybe your goal was too ambitious and you need to scale back.  When you do accomplish the goal, there’s no doubt that you’ve hit your target because the goal was specific, so you get a sense of accomplishment which makes you want to go out and try something else even more ambitious!  

Focus on Process Goals, not Outcome Goals

Outcome goals are pretty much what they sound like; you reach the goal when a specific outcome is reached.  Some examples of outcome goals include losing thirty pounds in six months, being able to do fifty pushups by March 1, and running a specific 5K or marathon.

Process goals are based on the specific effort you put in, not the end result.  Examples would be working out for at least twenty minutes three days a week, eating less than fifty total grams of carbohydrate a day for the month of January, and journaling five minutes every night for the next week.

Many people focus on outcome goals rather than process goals – every time you commit to losing a certain number of pounds or hitting a certain milestone in the gym, that’s an outcome goal.  Outcome goals aren’t necessarily bad – but, if you have a history of making resolutions that you haven’t met, focus on process goals instead.  

Why?  Outcome goals are not completely in your control.  Look at losing weight as an example.  Anyone who has spent any time trying to lose serious weight knows that you can follow exactly the same protocol twice and get wildly different results.  You can “do everything right” and still hit a stall that lasts weeks or even months.

So, what happens if you set losing a set number of pounds as a goal, do everything right, and still don’t hit it just because your body decides to be a jerk?  You’ll feel discouraged and not want to keep trying since you did everything right and still “failed”.  That’s not a recipe for success.  What if your goal is keeping your carbs under fifty grams a day, or working out three days a week every week for a month?  Then, even if your body decides to be a jerk and you don’t lose weight, you still get that boost of confidence that comes from hitting a goal.

Of course, you do want to hit your outcome goals eventually.  As you set and achieve process goals, you will want to adjust them if you never get closer to the outcome you ultimately want.  If you have been setting process goals for diet and exercise for a year, for example, and still haven’t gotten any closer to your goal weight, that’s a sign that you need to do more research and might need to start setting different process goals! 

As Steven Covey so famously pointed out in his classic book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, effective people focus on their “circle of influence” – what they can control – rather than their “circle of concern” – what can affect them.  Only process goals are fully within your circle of influence – so, if you struggle with setting goals that are too ambitious or that you find you can’t really reach, set process goals rather than outcome goals.  

Make Your Goals Easier Than You Think You Need To

Addictive and self-destructive behaviors, such as smoking, drinking, obsessive use of social media or video games, etc., are addictive largely because they continually give you a little sense of accomplishment, followed by a hit of “feel good” chemicals in your brain.  They effectively hijack the reward center of your brain – the part of your brain that tells you “hey, you just did something worth doing, I’m going to make you feel good so you want to do it again”.  That’s part of why bad habits can be so hard to break.

But here’s the good news – you can use that same part of your brain to help train yourself to establish some new good habits.  When you accomplish a goal you said you would accomplish, your brain releases those same “feel good” chemicals, reinforcing the behavior.  So, every time you hit a prespecified goal or milestone, you reinforce the behavior you’re doing.  

This means that setting more, smaller goals can actually be more helpful at reinforcing a new habit than a few, larger goals.  Let’s say your goal is to exercise four times a week for a month – then you won’t get that feel-good reinforcement for a whole month!  And, if the goal is difficult, you very well may not meet the goal, leading you to feel discouraged and making it less likely you’ll stick with it.  But if your goal is really easy – say, just getting your workout clothes on and spending five minutes moving your body in any way – then, you will easily hit that goal, which will make you feel good and reinforce the habit! (And, as an added bonus, once you’ve got your workout clothes on and start moving, there’s a very good chance that you will want to finish the workout!) 

It’s much easier to build on existing habits, even very small ones, than to establish completely new ones.  So, make your new habits smaller than you think you need to.  That way, you’ll get some easy wins early on which will motivate you to keep going and aiming higher!  It’s far better to set a goal which is “too low” and really hit it than to set a very high goal, miss it, and get discouraged and give up.  

Bringing It All Together: Commit to Five Minutes a Day

I strongly recommend James Clear’s excellent book Atomic Habits.   In Atomic Habits, James Clear recommends making your goals as easy, specific, and measurable as possible. A powerful strategy for doing this is to commit to five minutes a day.  

Part of your mind is probably telling you that five minutes a day isn’t enough to get anything done and you’ll just be wasting your time.  Think about it this way: if you are currently doing something for zero minutes a day, five minutes a day is five minutes better than what you are doing now.   The point is that you are building a habit; once you are already doing five minutes a day, it’s not that hard to up it to ten minutes, then fifteen minutes, and so on.  Lifestyle change is a marathon, not a sprint.  The goal is to be able to look back at the end of every month or year and be able to see progress, not to be perfect right away.

And you know what?  If you commit to five minutes a day, you’ll very likely find yourself doing more without even trying.   If you get your workout clothes on and start exercising, very likely you’ll feel good when the five-minute timer goes off and figure hey, I’m already exercising, why not just do a whole workout?  

Even if you do stop at five minutes, you may still be getting real benefits.  For example, I started journaling every night for just five minutes a night a few years ago.  I still do it regularly, and I still usually only write for five minutes – but I find that those five minutes are enough for me to feel like it helps me de-stress and organize my thoughts.

Sometimes less is more.  If you have made ambitious resolutions in the past and hit them successfully, good for you!  Keep doing exactly what you’re doing.  If you haven’t been successful in the past, though, what harm would it do to experiment with a new strategy?  By committing to just five minutes a day of exercising, cooking, journaling, playing guitar, praying, or anything really, you are establishing a new habit, while also making it super easy, specific, and entirely based on process rather than outcome.  You are setting yourself up for victory, albeit a small one.  And getting one victory under your belt makes you want another one.  Why not try five minutes a day this January first and see what happens?  What have you got to lose?