Happy 2024!

If you're still working on your 2024 resolutions, it's all good. So am I! In fact, I started the new year off in Mexico and have been spending the last several days back home in Colorado feverishly working on my 2024 resolutions, or as I like to call it, my 2024 Action Plan. If this is you too, great! Below I've outlined several methods for creating your Resolutions/Action Plan to make 2024 your best year yet. Set aside some self-care time this weekend and knock them out. Your future self will thank you 😊

Tim Ferriss: A Past Year Review

(See post published on 12/27/23 for more details.)

Summary: Look at the past year and identify your peak positive experiences and your peak negative experiences. In 2024, schedule more of your peak positive experiences and avoid scheduling any of the peak negative experiences.

Pros: Focuses exclusively on joy i.e. adding more joy to your life while completely removing things that don’t bring you joy. This method helps you identify what types of activities, events, experiences, and people bring joy to your life, which admittedly, is a worthy exercise in itself.

Cons: Doesn’t directly focus on making any lifestyle changes, adopting new habits or working towards any goals for the year. As I said in my previous post, this probably works best for those who generally feel like they don’t really need to accomplish or change much, as they feel they have their life pretty dialed in Or maybe they already have a system they use to enact changes continuously throughout the year? Either way, kudos to them!

Takeaways: I like how Tim emphasizes keeping a "NOT-TO-DO LIST" list as sometimes remembering what/who to avoid in your life is just as important.

Mel Robbins: A Past Year Review + Stop/Start/Continue Analysis + 1 Goal Action Plan

Summary: Conduct a past year review for various categories of your life as well as a stop/start/continue analysis i.e. what do you want to stop doing, start doing and continue doing in 2024. Then by reviewing everything you've journaled about, identify 1 goal you want to work on this year.

Pros: Provides a thorough review of your past year by asking some really good questions regarding not just highlights but hard times and lessons learned, which can be enlightening. When goal-setting, it does a good job of helping you identify why this goal is so important to you, so you can internalize your motivation to achieve it. Identifying behaviors or habits you want to stop was unique e.g. stop wasting so much time on social media, stop giving time to those who don't deserve it. etc.. The digital pdf is also easy to use and aesthetically pleasing.

Cons: A considerable amount of work (30 pages) and time for just one goal to come out of it. This could take you an entire day, depending on how thorough you want to be.

Takeaways: Although this was a lot of work, this process helped me understand exactly what one goal was most important to me - it jumped out at me like a lightning bolt! I really liked that it asked my "why" for this one goal, which reinforced my motivation to accomplish it.

Jesse Itzler: Big Ass Calendar

Summary: Plan your year using a physical wall calendar and the following guidelines:

• Pick 1 misogi: One big "year-defining" goal you’re going to achieve this year.
• 6 mini adventures: Every other month i.e. 1 day out of every 8 weeks, do something you wouldn’t normally do or something out of your comfort zone e.g. climb a mountain.
• 4 winning habits: Every quarter, add a winning habit e.g. “I’m going to meditate for 10 minutes every day.”

Pros: Focuses on adding new experiences to your life and picking things to do that you may not normally do. The more rich experiences you have in a year, the longer and more enjoyable, that year will feel.*

Cons: Doesn't focus at all on the "How." Simply putting “run a marathon” on the calendar doesn’t mean you’re going to do that, or even know how. I also worry that defining your year's success by whether you accomplished 1 goal is potentially setting yourself up for a bad time. James Clear discusses the downside to exclusively focusing on achieving goals versus setting up positive habits and systems, which I mentioned at the bottom of this post. Bottom line: just because you’ve written a goal on your calendar doesn't mean it's going to happen. This is my main complaint regarding resolutions - so many times, we just write a bulleted list of things we want to accomplish, but we don't delve into what we actually need to make them happen. This why I came up with my Action Plan process instead.

This method also doesn’t provide any guidance on what "winning habits" you should pick e.g. if starting a company is my 1 big goal, what should my winning habits be?

Takeaways: I like the idea of mini-adventures. This is not something I had originally included in my Action Plan but knowing what I know now about how rich experiences create a longer, fuller life*, I've added 4 mini-adventures to my 2024 Action Plan. I mean, who can say no to that?

2024 Action Plan: Vision Board to Reality

Summary: Visualize who you want to be 1 year from now and describe that person usings words, phrases or complete sentences. If it helps, you can create a vision board in this step. Review what you've written or see on your vision board and then summarize that future person using 3 words or phrases i.e. identifiers. Then identify 3 goals under each of the identifiers. Then create an Action Plan on how you’re going to achieve those 3 goals identifying any one-time actions or habits/systems you need to create.

Pros: Forces you to take your resolutions a step further and define goals or metrics for each resolution and then define what you need to do to meet that metric i.e. one-time actions or habits/systems. Uses the rationale from Atomic Habits that in order for new habits to stick, you need to make them part of your identity i.e. instead of simply saying: "I want to lose 10 lbs" as the goal, use the mantra or identifier "I am Healthy." Weight loss can be a metric you then use to achieve this resolution of being healthy.

Cons: After going through Jesse's methodology, this felt a little "all work no play." (I mean what do you expect from an engineer though 💁🏻‍♀️.) It's practical but also doesn’t directly encourage you to do anything new or exciting. Where’s the fun? Where’s the novelty? How do we ensure our 2024 Action Plan includes rich experiences?

In Summary

All in all, it doesn't matter what methodology you choose. (Heck, you can go through all of them if you'd like.) All that matters is that you do something! These resolutions/goals/mantras that you create this month should act as your North Star to guide you to become the person you want to become. They'll help you identify one-time actions to take, new habits to create, what joy-less activities or people to avoid, maybe some mini-adventures to embark on and can even help you make decisions regarding future requests or opportunities. (For example, if someone asks you to attend a particular event or take on additional work, does that align with your 2024 goals?) I constantly find myself checking back in with my 2024 Action Plan to remind myself of who I want to be at the end of the year and ensure that I'm living in a way that aligns with that. And I strongly encourage you to do the same. (How many times have we taken the time to write out resolutions only to completely forget them?)

And last but not least, give yourself Grace with a capitol "G." This is not an all or nothing thing. If you're like me, you've decided to accomplish some big goals, which require some big lifestyle changes. Big changes are not going to happen overnight, no matter how many times I say my 2024 mantras to myself. For example, I've mostly finalized my resolutions, but I'm using this time between now and the end of January to "try on" my resolutions, see how they fit, and procure or put into place anything I need to set myself up for success. For example, I'm changing my daily routine to add more structure to my day, so I can be much more productive and live a healthier, happier life. This also includes heavily limiting my social media use. So I'm creating new daily and weekly schedules as well as setting up Screen Time limitations and Focus windows on my phone to match this new schedule. This is going to force me to be much more disciplined than I currently am, which we all know is not going to magically happen overnight. Don't let it ruin your day (or your year) when you mess up.

Wishing you a peaceful and ✨inspiring✨ January!

*On living a richer life: Below is an excerpt from a podcast by Tim Ferriss interviewing Neuroscientist David Eagleman. (This entire podcast is fascinating, and I strongly encourage you to listen to it.)

"So, anyway, this was a whole bunch of research in my lab over the course of a decade that came together. But the point is, if you’re laying down richer memories, you won’t necessarily live longer, but you will make it seem as though you’ve lived longer. Because when you’re asking what just happened or how long has it been, you’ve got more data, more footage to draw on. And of course, we all know this feeling when you go on some super exciting trip on the weekend and you come back and you’re back on a Monday, you think, “Oh my gosh, it’s been forever since it was Friday. There’s so many things that happened.” But if you just have a normal weekend, you think, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s Monday. It was just Friday.” There’s nothing to write down, and so you don’t feel that there was much duration that happened there.

So, this is why I think one of the most important things in life is about seeking novelty and always putting yourself in new situations such that you’re laying down dense memories. The analogy last thing I’ll say on this is when you get to the end of a childhood summer, it seems that the summer lasted forever, and it’s because everything is new. So, you’re writing stuff down in your memory. But when you’re older, you’ve seen it all before, and you get to the end of the summer and you think, “Wow. I can’t believe it’s over already. I don’t really remember it at all. It seems as though the summer didn’t last long.”