Goal Setting, Intention Setting,Habit Making,and/or Continuous Improvement in 2020
I am starting out strong in 2020! This blog post is evidence of my commitment to this year’s new year’s resolutions, one of which is to write something each week. If you asked me what my new year’s resolutions for 2019 were, I honestly cannot name a single one. That’s bad, right? I think I am not alone in this. There has been a cultural trend towards changing the word “Resolutions” to “Intentions”. I feel they (whoever they are) are letting us off too easy. I picture an anonymous life coach saying, “it’s ok, at least you tried, don’t worry if you ate that donut two weeks into your no sugar pledge - you had really good intentions and you’re still a winner (pat on the head)!” Our culture of not allowing people to truly fail is at play here. To me, this seems pretty cowardly and the word intention is pretty feeble. If you don’t like the word “resolution” because it is maybe too scary, how about calling it “Continuous Improvement”. This is a hark back to my days when I worked at General Motors in the Lean Manufacturing team. My role was to help implement some of the Toyota systems of lean manufacturing that we “borrowed”, and transfer these successful philosophies to the GM factories. Continuous Improvement is the concept that small (even seemingly minuscule) changes and efficiencies over time, lead to larger changes and windfalls in the long term. In the manufacturing world, this referred mainly to improvements in cost and efficiency but in an individual, it could refer to health and wellness and becoming a better person (which may or may not lead to wealth and a longer life. There is no sure thing unfortunately - we just have to have some optimism). Anyways, I am going to continue to call my commitments for 2020 New Year’s Resolutions, and resolve to succeed. This year I have a new system in place, and I am hoping that it will make the difference! The purpose of this post is to share the system that I am determined to use, with the added benefit of creating some public accountability, as I will be sharing my actual resolutions here as well.
Daruma Doll goals…
Daruma Dolls
Before I talk about my personal resolutions though, allow me to share how I got the entire family to ponder the new year, and (sneakily) added an element of accountability to their resolutions as well. On January 1st, we had dinner at the hotel we were staying in at Cabo. I brought a small brown paper bag with me to dinner, and after we had ordered I told them I had a small surprise and opened the bag. I am sure they were hoping for some Gift Cards that we had forgotten to distribute at Christmas, but what I pulled out were five miniature Daruma Dolls. I believe at this point there might have been some rolling of eyes and perhaps some panic. My kids know what Daruma Dolls are, having grown up most of their youth in Tokyo. Simply put, the doll with two “empty” eyes, is a physical representation of your goal.
First you decide your goal, then fill in one eye. Once the goal is successfully achieved, you fill in the second eye. I explained to my family that this goal should be challenging but achievable…it is not a wish, a dream or something like, “I want to win the lottery”. My husband was the first to grab the Sharpie, and his goal of losing 20lbs is easy to measure and I am sure he will get it done. For the kids, the hardest part was figuring out what the measurable outcome would be - in other words, how to decide when to fill in the eye? We discussed their goals and helped them craft them, and I wrote everybody’s goal on a shared note in iNotes. To be frank, I had a hard time coming up with my own Daruma Goal. I already had a good list of resolutions, but I felt like I needed something special for the doll. As a family we brainstormed but couldn’t figure it out. It took me a day or two on my own, but finally I came up with one. “My goal is to declutter our home”. To be honest, I do not have a way to measure this, so it will be subjectively decided by me at the end of the year.
My New Year’s Resolutions
The main structure and how I plan to achieve my resolutions is by using the Done app. Each evening I open the app at the end of the day, and check off all the “habits” that I maintained that day. It is very satisfying to click on one of the “habits” and rack up another “point”…conversely, on the days I fail to achieve my goal, I am annoyed with myself and pledge to get back on track!
Here are my new year’s resolutions for 2020:
1SE
Upload a 1 second video to the One Second Everyday App (1SE) - this is a really fun way to record your year. I did it a few years ago and it is a great way to capture some memories. I had forgotten about it until my daughter reminded me. This is also one of her resolutions.
Blog Post- Write Something
I want to write something, and it doesn’t have to be long, every week. It might be a restaurant review, a post about a new Napa opening, a winery experience review, or just some musings on life! I am writing for myself and hope that someone out there is interested in what I write, but if not, that’s ok too! I just enjoy the process.
120 Dry Days/ 80 Moderate Days
This resolution is a carry over from last year! Last January I was at lunch my friend Anita, who had recently retired and moved to Spain, where she is pretty much on a permanent vacation, drinking rosé by the pool all day, everyday. She told me that in order to reign in the drinking a bit, she was committing to 100 dry days in the calendar year of 2019- not 100 days in a row (I admire those who do take this on), but a cumulative count. I thought that sounded like a great idea with a lot of flexibility and I told her I would join her on that challenge! In order to create some accountability I created a shared note in iNotes to record our progress. A friend of mine joined a few months later, even though she didn’t know Anita and she would need to “catch up”. On a day we had a dry day, we would note that and on occasion we could make a general comment as we felt the need. I am attaching a screenshot of my 2019 results.
OK, so here is the deal. I did NOT meet my goal of 100 days. I ended with 98 days…but I love this system. It really made me think twice about having a glass of wine when it really wasn’t something I wanted. For example, I was at the hair salon on a random Wednesday afternoon and they offered me a glass of wine. Without this “100 days” goal, I would have said, “sure, why not”, but truly I do not need to be drinking bad wine at the hair salon! On the other hand, if a friend said she had a bottle of some amazing and rare vintage she had just opened, then I could decide that this was worth the loss of a Dry Day in my tally and get myself over to her house ASAP.
This year I have recruited a few more friends, so there are now five of us on the shared note. (I did try to find an app but was not successful…I then considered making one!) This year, I am going for 120 Dry Days. Why would I be so bold if I didn’t make my goal last year, you may ask? Good question. I am not sure it is wise, but there are two reasons. First and foremost, my friend said she would join me on the challenge, but she would only do it if I upped my goal to 120. Challenge accepted! The second reason is that I feel 2019 was a particularly celebration heavy year. We celebrated two graduations, my big milestone birthday, and a big anniversary. August was a doozy as you can see from my results on the screenshot. Ouch. This year, with no big “its all about me” month, and no graduations or special milestones, I feel I should be able to make more progress! The only foreseeable problem is the added travel that we are planning as empty nesters, which might create for some challenging moments.
I have a sub goal of 80 moderate days. I set this goal because I found that once I had one drink, I often just kept drinking more with no moderation, because I figured the day was already not counting. I am hoping that the moderate days allow me to enjoy a glass of wine with a meal to be social, but prevent me from downing the entire bottle. Here is a screen shot of the 2020 shared iNote.
Meatless Mondays
Yes, finally I am jumping on this bandwagon. The evidence is just so strong that eating meat, particularly cows, is arguably the main contributor to climate damage (https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/11/15/how-much-would-giving-up-meat-help-the-environment). I don’t have a clear path forward on this yet, but the idea is to eat “no meat” at least one day a week. For now I am defining “meat” as four-legged animals. So that means fish and poultry are acceptable. I know it sounds kind of weak, but remember what I wrote in the introductions about Continuous Improvement? Perhaps I move from this to full vegetarian Mondays, and from there to vegan Mondays. We shall see!
Stay tune as my next audible listen is Jonathan Safran Foer’s new non-fiction book, We Are The Weather. This is on a recommendation of a friend, for whom it proved to be life-changing. It provided the impetus for this friend to fully sign on to a largely vegetarian lifestyle. What a change!
Read a book before sleeping
The goal is 15 minutes before bed, five times per week. Somewhere along the way I got out of the habit of reading…it didn’t just happen in a year or even a few years. Somehow it gradually happened over decades. I used to read non-stop all the time all day long. I devoured a book a day, at the very least. Long before we had tiny screens in the home, the only tv we had was in my parents bedroom! Reading was a family activity and we even brought our book to restaurants and read at the table! Imagine a little family of three sitting at the table reading instead of staring at their iPhones. Now I am in a book club, which forces me to read one book a month, but I find sometimes I don’t even finish that book! I blame Instagram and FB. Where I used to read when waiting in lines, or doctors’ offices, or before bed, now I catch up on social media and as we all know, this can be a massive time suck. I am now going to make more of an effort to read in bed, instead of sreentime in bed. My aim is to avoid the temptations of the iPhone and focus on getting back into the habit of reading! Hopefully I can write a few book reviews on the blog, and share some of my discoveries.
Water
“Drink more water” is a common enough resolution. It is easy for some but I am really bad at drinking water. So boring. This year I originally planned to set my resolution to 48 ounces of water (two of my hydroflasks full) until a friend sent me this interesting NYT article which basically debunks the commonly recited belief that we need 8 glasses of water a day. I found this article to be fascinating and made a lot of sense to me, so I reduced my goal to one flask a day.
Mobility/Yoga/Stretching
Similar to my terrible track record with drinking water, I have an even worse aversion to stretching and mobility. I feel great when I am mobilized and stretched but I rarely make the time to do it! It is probably the number one thing I need to do for my overall wellbeing, and to promote healthy aging, and yet I am quick to prioritize a workout or pretty much anything else, over this simple task. My goal for this year is to complete a minimum of 10 minutes a day, every day. On the days I can tack on extra time before or after Crossfit, I will just foam roll or stretch in the gym. On other days I will resort to the Peloton App for stretching and yoga, and maybe very occasionally log in to RomWod.com which is a daily streamed practice of holding intense stretches for many minutes - I find it quite tortuous and I hate the guy’s voice, but I will do it!
