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New Years Resolutions - An Engineering Approach
Hugh Pickens writes "Four out of five people who make New Year's resolutions will eventually break them and a third won't even make it to the end of January says the NY Times. But experts say the real problem is that people make the wrong resolutions. The typical resolution often reflects a general desire. To engineer better behavior, it is more productive to focus on a specific goal. '"Many clients make broad resolutions, but I advise them to focus the goals so that they are not overwhelmed," says Lisa R. Young. "Small and tangible one-day-at-a-time goals work best."' Here are some resolutions that experts say can work: To lose weight, resolve to split an entree with your dining partner when dining out. To improve your fitness, wear a pedometer and monitor your daily activity. To improve family life, resolve to play with your kids at least one extra day a week. To improve your marriage, find a new activity you and your spouse both enjoy such as taking a pottery class. On a lighter note: What was Steve Jobs' New Year's Resolution?"
"Small and tangible one-day-at-a-time goals work best."
You mean like: "Just try not to drink today"?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I made a resolution to learn some new languages. I happened to make Lisp my first choice, and I'm surprised by how smoothly it's going.
There's a really basic tool I've written in a number of languages before as a first project type exercise. It parses a series of command line options and interprets them in a getopts fashion. In Java, I split the problem into three classes, each consisting of about 100 lines of code on average. It wasn't particularly flexible, and specifying and interpreting the options was a bit messy.
Well, yesterday and today I've been writing the Lisp version, and I'm very impressed by what the language has allowed me to do. The whole thing is less than 100 lines of code and I've been able to put a lot more power and flexibility into the system. It presents a more concise and easier to understand interface to the world. Probably took about the same amount of time to write, but I was having to learn about a language paradigm with which I wasn't familiar, which isn't really the case with the other languages I've done this for.
Before I began this, I expected it would be something like the article recommends against, but having actually made something, however modest, I'm not so sure.
How dare you be so modest!! You conceited bastard!!
Well, it's not entirely arbitrary or useless. The holiday season provides more free time to think about the things one needs to do. Setting an end-of-holiday start date also takes some of the guilt out of holiday gluttony. Since our culture represents a change of year as significant, even if nothing much actually changes, it's easy to align planned change of oneself with it (why not file away a bad habit or two with the records of paid invoices for 2007?). It's also easy to track how long you've been sticking to your resolutions and seems somehow more significant, when you can call "this year" the year that you started doing things differently. It feels much more significant than telling yourself that you've been jogging since November 22. As far as delaying the onset, well, it can be useful to have a ramp up period. Besides, few people seriously conceive and postpone such resolutions in, say, July. Delaying something by one or two months won't make much of a difference, and you may even get an early start, so that when you officially begin, you start with an advantage.
Psychological problems just aren't engineering problems. You've got to motivate yourself, trick your yourself, bullshit yourself, whatever, to get the job done. Methods and solutions are not terribly clear, constants are few. You probably approach them as engineering problems for some of those very reasons. That approach gives you leverage, motivation, a conceptual framework, and confidence that you will get results.
I don't make New Year's Resolutions myself in any serious way, but I get why people do. I also try to separate the overemphasis junk t.v. places on the custom from the reality.
Anyway, the main point is leverage. One can start (and fail) something at any time, and the extent to which that intention produces serious discipline will vary greatly, as will the opportunities for creating some peer pressure to keep you on your toes. When you make official New Year's resolutions, you can exploit the custom to make things easier.
Remember, "eat less, exercise more" is, for example, a simple algorithm for losing weight, but doing those things isn't simple, like pressing a button. There are psychological problems to solve along the way. The bitch is, we can't see most of our programming.
Enough of my babble.
While I feel like small, easily measurable, attainable goals are good, I think the exact opposite can work, too - resolve something general that can be a bunch of different things and is something that even if you don't totally achieve, you can at least make progress towards. And rather than being something you can put off, or start to fail at or give up on, it should be something that if you have a bad day, week, or month, you just pick up where you left off. Losing weight, getting in shape, healthier eating habits, quitting smoking are all forms of taking better care of yourself - so just resolve to take better care of yourself, do the positive things you can do, and then at the end of the year you can look back and say "well, I didn't lose weight, but I ate healthier, got more exercise, and I'm actually taking vitamins consistently." For me, like a lot of people, the problem with making small, easily attainable goals is that I do those whenever I feel the need to - and it takes a major life event or feeling like I'm stuck to really assess my life and figure out what big changes I make. Culturally having everyone assessing the past year at the end of the calendar year seems like a good artificial way to encourage that. Any sort of resolution of the type this article suggests I would have started doing when I thought of it, and I feel like intentionally putting stuff off for New Year's just encourages you to continue to put it off after New Year's.
Lose weight, spend more time with your spouse, and more time at the gym (with your spouse if possible) and the chance of having more and better sex will improve.
Yeah, but the "spouse" constant there sort of torpedoes the whole equation. Make it a variable and you're on to something.
I'm not married, BTW. Just basing this on my observations of married friends.