New Years resolutions are notorious for being short-lived goals, and with 2026 coming up fast we’re beginning to think about them again. How can we reinvent ourselves in the new year? What are some goals that we want to achieve?

While self-improvement can be motivating and fun, it can be hard to stick to the promises we make ourselves at the beginning of each year. As a normal human being, I have also created many New Years Resolutions that I ultimately never kept up with. 2025 is my first year that I have stayed true to my New Years Resolution, and I could only maintain this because I changed a few key aspects of my goal-setting. In this post, I’ve compiled a few tips that I found useful in this year thus far that have helped me stick to my 2025 Resolution.

Why do you want to change?

When you set out your goals, be sure to have a clear reason why you want to achieve them. Although motivation is fickle, having a strong motive will help you get started and stay with your goal throughout the year.

For example, my New Years Resolution in 2025 was to build muscle. I had many reasons:

• prevent cognitive decline and reduce chances of dementia, something I learned in my psychology class
• reduce muscle atrophy as I age
• increase cardiovascular health (my family has a bad history)
• reduce chances of diabetes (my family has a bad history with this too)
• increase endorphin release and happiness
• increase focus
• help joint stability
• reduce chances of injury

The more reasons you have and the more they resonate with your core values, the harder it is to put the goal down.

How will you accumulate?

Self-improvement and growth are incredibly important, but the end destination often holds us in a chokehold and prevents us from answering the important question: how are you going to achieve these goals?

For example, it’s easy to say that you want to get 100% in your Physics 20 class because you want to be an aerospace engineer someday. But how will you do that? Will you study for an hour every day after school and 3 hours on weekends solely on physics? Will you attend each tutorial time?

Pick something that is easy to do on most days. Remember, you don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. In order to create a system you can stick with, you need to make sure that it’s so easy to maintain that you could do it on your worst day. When you feel better, you can add on more.

For my 2025 goal, I chose to go running for 15 minutes at least twice a week, and to weightlift for 5 minutes after. I already really liked running, but it was hard to keep up every day when I was used to running only during PE class. Starting small and then gradually building up when I felt like I was ready significantly helped me keep to this resolution. I changed speeds, I changed inclines, and I increased time, but I did all of that on top of the bare minimum. 15 minutes was just feasible enough for the worst version of me to do, which made it easy to stick with.

For reference, I could barely keep running for 15 minutes total in January and I can now run 5k in 30 min.

When will you do this?

Another important aspect of goal setting is clearly envisioning yourself accumulating to reach the end goal. When will you fulfill your bare minimum days?

Make it flexible, and make it fit your schedule. Add a “most of the time” to your goal. This means that even if you miss a day or a week, it doesn’t ruin your consistency because you were flexible enough with the initial plan.

In my example, my goal was “to run 15 minutes and weightlift 5 minutes twice a week most of the time”. I sprained my ankle in March and couldn’t walk for a month and a half, but I was able to get back up when it healed and continue with my goal because I could still achieve “most of the time” if I ran for the rest of the year.

Measuring Progress

What is your measurement of progress? How will you know if you’re making any at all if you don’t track this?

Progress is another major motivator. Again, although motivation is fickle, a little bit of it here and there after the initial January push happens never hurts. It keeps you on track. Try to track quantitatively so that your mood won’t affect your results.

For example, if you want to drink 2L of water every day to improve your energy levels, you can track the amount of time you focus for. Maybe you can only focus for 10 minutes at the start of the year, and maybe at the end of the year your hydration helps increase your forcus to 30 minutes. Or, if you want to get better grades by studying a few hours every day, track the amount of knowledge you can retain through apps like Anki and Quizlet and how your grades reflect your effort.

I measured my progress through my speed and the time I could run consistently for. I gave you some numbers – that’s not just to show my progress but also to help motivate me because there’s a clear “before” and “after” that comes from my hard work.

You can set a target to meet this way as well. You will have a way of actually measuring how close you are to the end goal.

TL;DR

Setting goals and constantly improving ourselves is important. But sticking to those goals is the reason we make them, so sometimes we need to take a step back to reevaluate. Here are some key things to keep in mind as we take on 2026:

• Why?
• How?
  • When?
• How much?