Break Your New Year’s Resolutions Into 90-Day Chunks

By Amy Streger for the To Resolve Project

Think about the long-term goals that you’ve set for yourself this year. When you will know that you’ve achieved them? If your answer is “by next year,” you might want to rethink your approach. By waiting for December 31, 2016 to measure your success of your 2015 goals, you’re spreading yourself too thin and giving yourself a tiny margin for failure. 

Laura Vanderkam, author of 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think, proposes breaking down your year-long goals into 90-day chunks: 

You may have lots of goals, and that’s a good thing. Giving yourself 90 days means you can focus on a few at a time, knowing that there’s another 90-day period coming up soon. Maybe during the first quarter you focus on launching a new product. Then in the second quarter you focus on finding a new and bigger space. At the end of six months, you’ll have the new product and the bigger space, whereas if you aimed to do both at once, you might get overwhelmed and figure out neither.

Don’t wait until the end of the year to assess your success. Break your year-long goals into shorter intervals so that you can fail fast and reset quickly if needed.

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