New Year's resolutions don't work, but New Year's themes do!

Do New Year’s resolutions usually work for you?

If so, I’m both impressed and curious how you do it—because they never really worked for me.

That’s why, well over a decade ago, I came up with a different idea that has been a lot more helpful.

Instead of New Year's resolutions, I do a New Year’s Theme.

What’s a New Year’s Theme?

A New Year’s theme is something that helps guide my decision-making throughout the year.

It’s not meant to be super detailed, or to force, pressure, or guilt me into doing specific things at specific times or in specific amounts.

It’s simply meant to help guide my decision-making, so that by the end of the year, the majority of my choices—but not necessarily 100% of them—are aligned with my primary goals.

This eliminates the feeling that I might as well give up on a resolution if I don’t follow it for long enough (whatever that means) or do it well enough (according to made-up standards). And it gets me closer to my goals in a more realistic and sustainable way.

How do I use it?

Whenever I’m unsure about what to prioritize, struggle to decide between multiple options, have free time I don’t know what to do with, and other such dilemmas, I refer to my theme and think about which priority, choice, or activity best fits it.

If, for example, my theme is “health” and a friend asks me if I want to go for pizza and beer or a hike, my theme makes that decision easy.

If my theme is “create” and I’m wondering whether writing the scripts for a new online course or reorganizing my website should be at the top of my to-do list, well, my theme will have me scripting in minutes.

How do I pick a New Year’s Theme?

There aren’t any hard rules on how to create your own theme, so feel free to do what makes most sense to you.

But after doing this for a very long time, I do have a couple of recommendations.

1) Less is more effective.

First, don’t try to pick a theme that fits everything you want to do or achieve in the coming year. That’s usually not very realistic, and even if you do find something that fits everything, you need to allow yourself to take a break from your goals at times.

Instead, focus on the most important 1-2 goals in your life and see if there’s a theme that will help move you closer to both.

If, for example, you want to improve your health and be more productive at work, is there a common thread that is currently holding you back in each area?

For me a few years back, I realized that my lack of preparation was a significant problem in both areas, so “preparation” became my theme.

Among other things, this theme got me to start prepping healthy meals (instead of just grabbing whatever was quick when I was in a hurry) and begin each workday by prioritizing the day’s tasks (instead of just doing whatever happened to be at the top of my to-do list).

These habits continue to serve me well to this day.

2) Keep it short.

Detailed, sentence-length themes might feel more precise or clear, but my experience—in my own life and among the many people I’ve shared this with—is that 1-2 word themes will pop into your thoughts all on their own far more often.

The trick to maintain precision and clarity is to give those 1-2 words your own, personal definition.

So when my theme was “adventure”, it wasn’t about seeking out all kinds of crazy, extreme experiences or always seeking out the unknown. It was about prioritizing fun, play, and new experiences in my time off from work.

As long as you create your own definition that you can associate with your theme, the exact words you choose really aren’t all that important.

(PS: it’s a good idea to write both your theme and definition down somewhere easy to find. Even I have completely forgotten mine a couple of times when life threw me unexpected curve balls that shifted my focus for a significant time.)

Want to play the Theme Game with me?

If this sounds interesting to you, I’d like to invite you to do this with me for the coming year.

Take some time to decide on a theme that seems right for you and find a way to remind yourself of it often enough in the coming weeks that it sticks in your mind. Then get into the habit of thinking about your theme as often as you can when you're facing decisions, prioritizing time or energy, and similar, and let it guide you.

Remember, it's not supposed to dictate all your decisions or make you feel bad when you go in another direction. It's supposed to help you make a choice when you don't know what to do, encourage you to break your habits when you have the time and energy for it, and be a guiding light to navigate towards in your everyday life.

And if you run into any problems using your theme, feel free to reach out here any time in the next 12 months and describe your issue, and I'll be happy to see how I can help.