Introduction
Welcome to January, the month where everyone is boasting about their New Year’s Resolutions. This is it. This is the year you’ll stick with that fitness routine, the year you finally finish that one project you’ve been procrastinating, the year you’ll finally become the person you want to be. Then, a few weeks later, the initial burst of motivation fades, and you revert right back to your usual routine. This is the inevitable result of relying on motivation to get you through a goal. While motivation is often the spark, it can’t be the fuel. Just like a fire, long-term goals require a variety of variables to keep them burning. This blog will go over how to establish a routine to ensure long-term progress, with unique tips you might not have heard before to help you stick to your schedule.
Table of Contents
How to Choose a Goal
Step one of accomplishing a goal is, well, choosing it. This sounds like a duh moment, but hear me out. Most people pick goals wrong. If you want greater specificity on how to select goals, check out last year’s blog on New Year’s Resolutions: How To Come Up With Goals That Stick. For the sake of focusing on the path toward a goal rather than the goal itself in this blog, I’ll simply say to make sure your goal meets these criteria: realistic, quantifiable, and rewarding.
For example: Getting fit is a terrible goal. Not because it’s bad to want to improve your health, but because it is so vague. Here’s how we can fix it.
- Realistic: How much time can you dedicate to this goal? What’s your current fitness level? Do you have access to workout equipment or nutritious food? These all must be accounted for and calculated into your goal so that you aren’t left feeling disappointed when the outcome isn’t what you had hoped.
- Quantifiable: Rather than saying you’ll get fit, say you’ll exercise X amount of times a day for X amount of time per session. Perhaps you’ll only go out to eat once a week, or you’ll join your local bike club for a bike ride every Saturday. Whatever the case may be, make sure you can count it. This is an easy way to ensure that you know what steps to take toward your goal and track progress throughout the year.
- Rewardable: Is this a goal you actually desire, or just something you feel like you should do? Peer pressure or societal standards should not determine your choices. You are more determined to take action when it is for your own sake rather than for others.
So, a revised goal may be: I’d go to the gym three times a week for 30 minutes each session. Now, that’s a goal we can work with. You can clearly envision the steps you must take to accomplish this goal, which is the first major hurdle. Now, we just have to stick with it.
scheduling
Ah, schedules. The thing we’re always told to use to keep track of everything, but when plans clash with one another, it becomes overwhelming. It can be a hassle to try to incorporate a strict routine into your current lifestyle, which is why people who believe that you must rise at the crack of dawn and do a ten-step routine before 6 am to succeed often burn out. Scheduling isn’t necessarily about overthrowing your current lifestyle, but rather, working with it to create consistency.
Setting aside time for a goal makes you more likely to do it. Consider this: you have homework due next week. It can feel easy to push it aside for something more interesting, with the excuse that you’ll simply do it later. But then, the deadline is the next morning, and you have to pull an all-nighter to complete the work. We don’t want the same thing to happen with our long-term goals, where we realize by the end of the year that we had pushed aside any attempt to actually accomplish them. By setting aside blocks of time, we program our brains to focus on the task at hand over time. For example, if you studied from 4-5 pm every day, then finishing that homework would have become second-nature because you’re used to studying in that period.
Location
Location is fixed for many goals. For example, if we stick with the going to the gym goal, your location will be at the gym. But, even if your goal isn’t necessarily locked down to a specific place, it’s a good idea to do so. By separating locations into different purposes (Ex: kitchen=eat food and living room=watch TV), you are more likely to focus since your brain has determined that when you’re in that location, you will complete your tasks.
Let’s use an at-home example to demonstrate what I mean. You are an author, or at least, you want to be. But, you still haven’t written that first draft. Every time you sit down on your bed to write, you get sucked into research spirals and browsing YouTube for the best music compilation so you can finally write that story. By the time you’re ready, your time block is up, and you need to move on to the next task.
So, how do we fix this? First off, your bed. Your bed should only be used for sleeping and relaxation, not work (in fact, insomnia is often linked to using the bed often for activities not usually suited for a bed, such as working on a laptop). Write at a desk or a designated study space. When you sit down in that area, you are telling yourself that you are in your writing space, and so, you will write.
Now that we are situated, let’s set up your desk for success. First off, lock down any distractions, including that cheeky little Google search you say is essential to research (if you really need to research something, write [tbd] in your draft and continue writing; go back to it later). Distractions may include your phone, friends, or even the smell of food wafting in from the kitchen. No matter what is distracting you, aim to eliminate the intensity of the distraction by isolating your workspace from the excessive stimulus. For example, you can use apps to shut down your apps for a certain amount of time to avoid the temptation of doomscrolling. Also, make sure that your comfort is set up. If you need to listen to music to work, find the music before you start writing, not during, when you could easily become distracted. If you need a good cup of coffee or a journal, then have those on the desk as well. You are in control of your environment, so you use it to your advantage.
Support
While I’m no advocate for peer pressure, it is overwhelmingly true that telling another person of your goals makes you more likely to accomplish them. This is for many reasons, with some being that the other person will support you on your journey, you’re afraid of failing and them knowing, or they’re working with you to accomplish a similar goal to yours.” Reach out to friends and family for help as you tackle this new challenge in your life.
Conclusion
Sticking to goals is hard. But as this post demonstrates, it isn’t too difficult to establish a routine. Through consistently showing up for yourself (with your friends cheering you on from the sidelines), you can prove that no matter how high the mountain of progress is, you’ll reach the top.