Featured Faculty
Leadership Jan 1, 2026
How to Set the Most Effective New Year’s Resolutions
It’s time to think about what you want to do, try, and change in 2026. Here’s a plan for making your resolutions a success.
Lisa Röper
Summary Setting New Year’s resolutions requires a plan for achieving them—including systematically allotting time to pursue all the things you want to do, try, and change in the year ahead. Constructing a grid structure allows you to prioritize activities by how many hours you intend to spend on them, how many hours you actually spend on them, and what difference you see in them over time. Focused self-reflection can help make these resolutions more realistic and achievable.
With the new year upon us, it’s natural to start thinking about all the things you want to do, try, and change. On your list of resolutions for 2026 may be more than just the usual goals such as exercising regularly. This year, you decide to raise the bar for yourself, with bigger challenges, like running a marathon. In your career, you’re not just thinking about a new assignment; you want to go for a bigger job. Plus, you’ve always wanted to learn French, try skydiving, and read a book every week.
Your resolution list is ambitious, but with one important omission: time. You’re overlooking the fact that no one has an unlimited number of hours to pursue everything. Instead of getting discouraged, you need to channel your time and energy into your priorities. The result will be more effective resolutions that will provide lessons learned and progress made in 2026.
How to optimize your 2026 plan to fit 168 hours a week
No matter what your profession is, where you live, how productive you are, or how much you multitask, you face the same time limit as everyone else: 168—the number of hours in a week. This immutable fact means you have to prioritize, particularly in those areas where you want to make the most improvement. Otherwise, you will set yourself up for failure, becoming one of the majority of people who break their resolutions after only a month or two. This year, however, can be different!
It starts with a simple grid with four columns across the top: Activity, Goal Hours, Actual Hours, Difference. Under “Activity,” list what you typically spend your time on—such as working, family/friends, exercise/sleep, recreation/reading, spirituality, and volunteering/making a difference. Your list will reflect what your life looks like now.
Next, think about your “Goal Hours”—the amount of time you would like to spend on each activity per week, based on how important it is to you. If your goal hours add up to more than 168, make adjustments to account for 100 percent of your time.
Now comes the real eye-opener. Track the actual hours you spend on each activity over a few weeks. As you record the difference between goal hours and actual hours, there are bound to be variations from week to week. For example, if you’re traveling on business one week, you’ll spend far more hours on work and devote fewer to family/friends. Perhaps the next week you take a day off, and time spent with loved ones increases. Or maybe binge-watching streaming content takes up far more hours than you would ever admit.
Faced with this reality of how you spend your 168, you may realize that in order to add hours to anything to the grid—for example, taking up meditation or learning a second language — you must subtract from something else.
Take your resolutions from wish lists to an action plan
Resolutions may start with a wish list, but they become an action plan when you engage in self-reflection. Not only is self-reflection a healthy and helpful discipline for encouraging self-awareness, it’s also the foundation of values-based leadership that can improve the quality of your personal and professional life.
Here are four ways self-reflection can make your resolutions more effective:
1. Self-reflect on your priorities. Step back, away from the noise and distractions, and ask yourself questions to determine your priorities and what matters most:
- What are my values? What are my priorities?
- If I say something is a top priority (e.g., family or health/exercise), do I actually devote enough time to it?
- Where am I experiencing the disconnect between what I say and what I do?
The insights you can gain from 15 minutes of self-reflection will help you see your priorities more clearly—and how well or poorly you adhere to them.
2. Set goals that make sense. With the benefit of self-reflection, you can set goals that are realistic and achievable. Let’s take the example of exercising more regularly, which is a common theme in New Year’s resolutions. Instead of setting expectations that are too high—going to the gym for two hours a day, seven days a week—how about starting with a one-hour workout, three days a week? While that may seem anticlimactic compared with your grandiose plan, the pursuit of realistic goals is far more effective in helping you develop healthy habits.
As you set incremental goals toward your desired outcome, the key is to make them aggressive enough to be meaningful, while still being achievable.
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Harry Kraemer
The same approach applies to your career. Perhaps you’ve decided that this is the year you want to get a bigger title, more money, more responsibility. However, instead of trying to reach that higher level in one step, set a plan to pursue stretch assignments, engage with a mentor, and meet regularly with your boss about goal setting and accountability. Not only will you have a plan for pursuing a promotion, but you’ll also be better prepared when you land the new position.
3. Focus on progress, not perfection. As you set incremental goals toward your desired outcome, the key is to make them aggressive enough to be meaningful, while still being achievable. Let’s say that you’re running a $20 million division and you want to grow to $100 million in annual sales. To get there, you need a plan— or example, to increase sales next year by 50 percent to $30 million. With that momentum, growth can continue or even accelerate until reaching $100 million. This thinking also applies to personal goals— or example, a marathon. Since you can only run a mile or two right now, an incremental goal for encouraging progress is to train for a 5K (3.1 miles) and then a 10K (6.2 miles). With time and commitment, you may compete in a half-marathon and eventually a marathon.
4. If at first you don’t succeed, try over (and over) again. Your new resolution is to get up at 5:30 each morning to meditate for 20 minutes, then jog for 40 minutes. Before the first week of January ends, though, you’re hitting the snooze button. Don’t give up! Engage in self-reflection to figure out what’s derailing your plan and how to adjust. Perhaps the dark, cold days of January are better for starting with meditation; then begin jogging when the weather improves. Or the issue may be finding support.
When I was an undergraduate student, I decided to start running three miles every morning. The first day it rained, and I was tired. The second day, I had to finish a paper for class. That’s when I told my roommate how difficult it was to run every morning. “I’m going, too,” he told me. Call it camaraderie or competition, as long as one of us was going out the door, the other wouldn’t be left behind—rain or shine.
Your New Year’s resolutions will only be words on paper unless you make them achievable and meaningful. With greater self-awareness of both your priorities and how you currently spend your time, you’ll be able to set resolutions that are far more effective—and help you achieve what matters most to you.
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This article originally appeared in Forbes.
