Stick to Your Personal New Year Resolutions With These Goal-Setting Frameworks

Why New Year resolutions fail

Despite thousands of memes around failed New Year resolutions, setting yearly goals remains a social media ritual with an interesting cultural significance. This analysis of Twitter posts explored a variety of attitudes towards New Year resolutions, from genuine to sarcastic, from promising to be a better person to accepting oneself more.

So, the concept is very loaded with different meanings. However, according to a recent study, only 6.5% of US adults were committed to their January goals by June this year. Why so?

Here’s another interesting aspect of failed New Year resolutions. A paper about goal disengagement proposes that failing a New Year resolution isn’t always bad. Adaptive disengagement, or giving something up because it’s unattainable, not a priority or a desire of yours anymore, is actually more productive than banging on a closed door just because you committed to the bit.

Even more interesting, disengagement doesn’t necessarily mean quitting. According to the same paper, only 7% of US adults in two longitudinal New Year resolutions studies from 2016 and 2018 explicitly gave up their goals. Others basically put them in the backlog, meaning they were still committed but not pursuing the goal actively right now.

So, failing your resolutions is not always bad. However, if you want to keep them in 2024, consider these risk factors:

• Wrong goals that can be too ambitious or just not what you want because of ✨social media stunts✨ — or not even a goal that has a clear path to success.
• Long-term planning difficulties — you can’t really plan a pandemic, yet another global crisis, or even personal perturbations.
• The lack of commitment and self-regulation, which is self-explanatory.
• The instability of your own priorities — you this and the next New Year’s Eve may end up being two completely different people.

10 goal-setting frameworks that may help you stick to the plan

Goal-setting frameworks used for business won’t help you avoid global crises. However, they can help you assess how attainable your resolution is, map out the road to success, come up with a backup plan, or just look at your goals from a different point of view.

Business planning comes in many shapes and colors — let’s explore some of the goal-setting frameworks and how they can be applied to your personal goals.

SMART goals

How does it work? This is Selzy’s personal favorite — for example, we mentioned it in the ultimate email marketing checklist. Here’s a quick reminder:

• Specific — the goal and the expected result should be formulated in a crystal clear way.
• Measurable — preferably, the goal should be quantitative.
• Achievable — the goal should be realistic, so stuff like “be the best company on the market” is off the table.
• Relevant — the goal should coincide with your team’s current priorities. For example, if the goal deals with increasing brand loyalty, spending money on customer acquisition is a distraction.
• Time-bound — the goal should have a strict deadline.

Best for:

• Basically everyone

Possible problems:

• The framework lacks flexibility both for business and personal goals.
• Not all personal goals can be translated into numbers.
• SMART only describes the destination not the road to it.

Objectives and Key Results

How does it work? Objectives and Key Results, or OKR is a business goal-setting framework popular in the IT field. It consists of:

• Objectives — a qualitative characteristic of what exactly you need to improve. For example, a business objective can be “Create the best email marketing software”.
• Key Results — quantitative smaller goals that will lead to your objective. If we use the objective above, these results can be something like “Hire a qualified product designer”, “Analyze all the competitors on the market”, “Come up with and develop three unique features for our ESP”, and so on.

There’s also an OKR+A modification of this framework that includes Actions. Actions are small tasks and their assignees. For example, a product team lead may be responsible for running a brainstorming session for new product features.

Best for:

• Ambitious people who think big
• Goals that imply teamwork

Possible problems:

• An overly long list of key results may seem too overwhelming.
• The original version of the framework doesn’t include detailed planning, so you can’t really use key results as a to-do list.
• In the context of personal goals, it’s easy to attribute wrong key results to the objective.

Backward goals

How does it work? Basically, you come up with the end goal and plan the road to it backward, approaching your current state. For example, you want to get 1,000 new customers by the end of 2024. It implies that, by the middle of the year, you need to implement a new marketing channel and get two new partnerships, and so on until the present day. 

Best for:

• Those who easily set goals but have trouble moving towards them
• People who can’t figure out the first step
• Career-related goals
• People who need a “why” behind their deadlines

Possible problems:

• The backward planning method only works for the goals with a more “algorithmic” way to achieve them.
• The self-imposed deadlines may not always work due to external factors — be careful with brainstorming steps involving other people and their decisions.

BSQ goals

How does it work? The BSQ framework unites three principles:

• Think Big: define an ambitious goal. For example, implement email marketing in your business and make it profitable.
• Act Small: come up with a series of small milestones that will move you closer to the goal. For example, choose a paid ESP, hire an email marketing specialist, set up Google Analytics, and so on.
• Move Quickly: write down the tight deadlines for each milestone.

Best for:

• People who need little dopamine hits along the way to the big goal
• Goals involving a project that should be started and completed by a certain date

Possible problems:

• It’s not the best choice for lifestyle-related goals like “Eat healthier” or the goals like “Find a partner” that are not so easy to plan.
• The framework offers no guidelines for setting up the goal itself, which leaves room for setting up poorly feasible goals.

WOOP goals

How does it work? WOOP stands for Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, and Plan:

• Wish — what you want to do, for example, establish an editorial for a corporate SEO blog. However, this is not the goal in itself: you “wish” it because you want the desired Outcome.
• Outcome — the results of the achieved goal, for example, increased website traffic and sales.
• Obstacle — what can hinder your success, for example, low budgets and unreliable freelance authors.
• Plan — a step-by-step instruction on what to do to overcome an obstacle. In the corporate blog case, it can be hiring more freelancers to ensure a more stable stream of articles.

Best for:

• Anxious people who need a plan B for a plan B
• Secondary goals — in our example, an established editorial is not really a goal in itself

Possible problems:

• You can’t foresee all the possible obstacles.
• Careful what you wish for — you can’t predict the “outcomes”.

The golden circle

How does it work? The golden circle framework for goals is a no-brainer. Basically, you need to answer three questions:

• Why do I want this? For example, you want to increase your ROI to support your team with a salary increase.

• How can I achieve this? For example, by increasing the efficiency of your marketing efforts.

• What can I do to make my “How” come true? For example, you can start by gathering data from various channels and stop investing in the less effective ones.

Best for:

• Purpose-driven people
• People who need to distinguish between “socially acceptable” and their own goals and ambitions in life

Possible problems:

• If you fail at answering the “How?” question correctly, you’re essentially doomed to move in the wrong direction.
• May come off as too vague for some people because it sets the goal but doesn’t map out the road to it.

Locke & Latham

How does it work? Long story short, the business goal-setting theory by Locke & Latham is basically SMART with a twist. Here are the main features of a goal approved by these two guys:

• Clear-cut. It’s essentially the “Specific” in SMART, so no to stuff like “Make money” and yes to stuff like “Earn extra $10,000 by the end of Q4 2024”.
• Challenging. Reasonably demanding goals keep employees motivated. If the goals are too easy, people get bored. If the goals are too hard to achieve, people rage quit.
• Engaging. Every task should have a purpose that should be explained to employees. For example, if you’re a copywriter writing SEO articles for the blog, you should stick to the specific requirements for document formatting in Google Docs so that further markup will be easier.
• Feedback. To achieve the goal, each employee should be provided with regular feedback, especially positive to keep the morale points up.
• Small steps. A goal should be broken down into small, digestible steps — and employees should understand how each small task contributes to the goal.

Best for: 

• Resolutions related to pet projects and anything requiring teamwork
• People with a strong social motivation

Possible problems:

• It’s very team-focused, so it might not be the best choice for personal goals.
• It relies on an external figure as your “boss” — you can’t really give feedback to yourself.

One-word goals

How does it work? This one is very broad and simple — you choose a word, make a mind map of associations around it, and think of what you can do to succeed. For example, you’re a manager and your word in question is “productivity”. You may start thinking about what hinders both personal and team productivity and find out that the root of evil is too many Zoom meetings. Then, you think of how you can optimize the processes so you have fewer and shorter but more meaningful calls. 

Best for: 

• More general New Year resolutions like “Improve my life”
• People who crave flexibility in planning because of global crises
• People who don’t know what they want

Possible problems:

• No real success criteria
• May come off as too vague for some people
• Not really self-sufficient — you may need to use other frameworks for specification

Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals

How does it work? This one is the most vague on our list — and maybe it’s not that applicable to yearly planning. The thing is, you should come up with a very ambitious and value-based goal that is more like a mission that should inspire and drive your team to success. It’s easier to explain through examples: take Microsoft’s “A computer on every desk, in every home”. 

Best for:

• Purpose-driven people
• People who start every morning with a cup of ambition

Possible problems:

• This one is more about values than actual planning and achieving.
• It’s not that different from the “classic” New Year resolutions.
• It may come off as too overwhelming when it comes to personal goals — it’s very easy to fail and start bashing yourself for it.

Will these frameworks work though?

Implementing planning frameworks like SMART seems like a no-brainer — at least it can solve the problem with unattainable New Year resolutions that we mentioned earlier. However, not all our team members supported the idea.

So, personal applications of SMART and other frameworks have two main drawbacks: they were created for teams and they may come off as detached from the complex reality of being a human. They also may not win the battle with the chaos of life, just as regular New Year resolutions:

However, despite these drawbacks, our thought experiment sort of makes sense — here’s why:

How to keep your New Year resolutions: Advice from Selzy team members

After all, no matter how you choose to plan your next year, it all comes down to your determination and discipline. If using business frameworks is not up your alley, what can you do? Here are some ideas from the Selzy team members.