Ben Huss from 3goodthings gives easy tips for keeping your New Year’s resolution and recommends Pledgehammer. Need I say we concur?
Leo Babauta is an author, creator of Zen Habits and probably one of the better known bloggers on motivation, inspiration, getting stuff done and other postmodern topics alike. On his 6changes blog he recently wrote about the importance of making your pledges public. He’s left out Pledgehammer as one of the ways to make resolutions public but hey, no-one’s perfect.
Two steps in the 6 Changes method are extremely crucial, even if many people will be tempted to skip them:
- Commit as publicly as possible to creating each new habit.
- Log your progress daily, and very publicly.
These steps are extremely important — without them, you’re liable to drop your new habit at any time.
I know this from personal experience: my first successful habit change was quitting smoking, and I had failed at this habit 7 times before finding the successful formula. Many times I just told myself that I’d quit the next day, without telling anyone, because … if I failed, no one would know, and it wouldn’t be embarrassing. You can probably guess that I failed because I knew no one would judge me for it.
And so when I committed publicly, I didn’t fail. I told everyone I knew. I joined a smoking cessation forum and told everyone there I was quitting. I made a promise to my wife and oldest daughter. I was all in.
You need to be all in. You need to tell everyone. You need to be completely committed, or you’re wasting your time.
How to Commit Publicly
Some ways to do it:
- If you have a blog, that’s perfect. Tell everyone on your blog that you’re going to create this new habit.
- Social networks are also great: Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, etc.
- Email all your friends and family and let them know.
- Tell all your coworkers, and even post a sign in a public place in your office.
- Write a column for your local newspaper or a blog or magazine.
- Join a forum of others doing similar things, and tell them all about your habit change.
There are other ways you might think of, but these are some ideas to start you off.
How to Log Your Progress Publicly
It’s just as important that you not only commit, but stay accountable to the same people you committed to.
So if you committed on your blog, on a social network, or on a forum, post your progress every day to that same place. If you committed via email, send out daily email updates. If you told your coworkers and posted up a sign, let them all know, every day, how you’re doing.
A good alternative is to find a public log, such as FitDay or The Daily Plate or The Daily Mile or Daytum something like that (see my Daytum), or even just create a public Google Docs spreadsheet, and then share the link to your public log with everyone. Don’t let this become a place to hide your progress, though — you need to remind everyone, often, to check your log so that you’ll feel accountable.
However you do it, engineer it so that you can’t back down. Be all in.
There is a great article in Wall Street Journal on New Year’s resolutions. According to a study, led by Dr. Norcross from University of Scranton in Pennsylvania, the majority of New Year’s resolutions do fail but this overshadows an important truth: the simple act of making a New Year’s resolution sharply improves your chances of accomplishing a positive change—by a factor of 10.
Journalist Sue Shellenbarger also gives six tips that will help you keep your resolution, among them announce your intentions to develop positive ‘peer pressure’. We concur 100%.
I first came across Richard Wiseman in Life On Board project (part 2 here) where he discusses the matters of luck and destiny with Cris Gardener. One point these gentlemen make and that I’ve often thought about later is that ‘luck’ is something you can create yourself. Or rather that luck is something that you don’t wait for passively but rather it comes to those that actively prepare for its arrival.
I now keep an eye on Richard’s blog and Twitter and I was recently glad to discover that his new book is very much related to setting goals and making New Year’s Resolutions. He has identified four tips that greatly increase to odds of sticking to a resolution and has even developed a cool little mini quiz that will help you understand how likely you are to keep it. For example writing a resolution down so that’s it’s clearly measurable and sharing it with people around you help a great deal. May I suggest using Pledgehammer for this?
We received this email the other day:
Dear CEO,It’s almost mid-year, a good time to look back at our New Year’s resolutions and goals of all sorts. (Or make them if you haven’t written your aims down yet.)
At Pledgehammer we looked back at all the pledges made so far. By far the largest category of resolutions, at four in ten, are related to health and well-being. 12% of people resolved to exercise more, 10% pledged to give up smoking or drinking, 9% aimed to lose weight and further 9% wanted to make changes in their diet such as give up sweets or become vegetarian.
Second most popular resolution area was personal development. 11% of people pledged to learn new skills such as a language, read more books or get involved with what’s going on in the world.
At 6%, third in popularity was a category that can be labelled as pledges about relationships. Resolutions ranged from coming home earlier and spend more time with the family to the rather thought provoking resolution to fall in love with someone else now, not person R.
5% of people resolved to do something green(er) or charitable. And another 5% of people made pledges relating to their finances such as pay back credit card debt or have a certain amount of money in their bank account by a certain time.
Then there was 10% of people that used Pledgehammer as a to do list and pledged something pretty mundane such as write two SEO posts per month, find a job or get one’s kitchen organized. And the final 17% can be categorized as ‘other’, with pledges ranging from not spending more than 20 consecutive nights in London and beating Carl at tennis to stop pissing in baptist church foyers or take better care of my tractor. One can safely say this last category of resolutions contained the most humour.
27% of pledges have ended at the time of writing this blog. And of pledges ended to date 27.3% were successful. This is much more than the conventional wisdom of ‘nine out of ten New Year’s resolutions fails’ would suggest. Part of this can be attributed to the stage where Pledgehammer is at - early adopters that have made pledges on the site are not representative of the population on average and total number of pledges is still fairly small. But it may also very well be that Pledgehammer actually helps to keep promises.
According to the academics at the University of Kent altruism is not the only reason why people, especially men, donate to charity. Rather it’s done to impress the opposite sex. Because of that the academics recommend charities to include ‘mating goals’, such as the face of an attractive woman or man, in fundraising campaigns to increase donations. Read the full story.
We’ve read the story but are not planning to add faces of people to the site, just so you know.
One of the questions we had when we launched Pledgehammer was: do people actually make resolutions at times other than the New Year’s Day. The good news is they do, number of pledges has grown steadily. They just don’t do it as much as they do on January 1st. However there are small spikes around Chinese New Year, beginning of Lent and April 1st. (The latter rather related to the fact that a quarter of the year has passed, not so much to April Fool’s Day, I presume.) I’m sure we’ll see more of small spikes like these during the rest of the year.
It’s also good people write about making resolutions and about websites like Pledgehammer throughout the year.
Debra over at The Metamorphosis Cafe wrote we have a cool name for a cool concept. She has a cool name and concept as well. Her blog is about various different topics that help one to transform into a better person.
And Martin write a blog post where he describes us as Small and good. At least I think so, because it’s all in Swedish. If Google Translate is right he also writes: By the way - all web services should be equally funny Terms of Service as Pledgehammer. Cheers, Martin! And if you haven’t yet read our legal small print, you’re very welcome to.
One of the topics that I have been passionate about for sometime is the need to build successful habits to reach your potential. Dr. Tony Schwartz teaches in the Power of Full Engagement that we have a finite amount of self-discipline and therefore we can only set out to change a limited number of things in our life at a time without running out of energy.
Ever wonder why you are not the only one who has failed at keeping 29 different New Years Resolutions? He says the solution is to build habits. Habits once effectively established no longer take self-discipline to keep going, but rather energy to break.
An important part of building these new habits is being accountable. I recently ran across a website that does just that, helps you be accountable.
” Wealth Habit blog (Yes, it’s Pledgehammer they’re talking about)Pledgehammer was reviewed by Inventor Spot and Too Lazy To Do It. The former is a website about the latest inventions, innovations and interesting ideas from Obama twittering to a electrical talking bananas. And Too Lazy To Do It is not a procrastination site, but a project aimed at letting business ideas circulate, grow, and become a reality. They write:
Pledgehammer seems to be entirely founded on the honor system, i.e. their is nothing but personal honor requiring people to actually pay up for failing to reach their goal. It seems rather unlikely that someone who habitally breaks promises would choose to keep a pledge to website (and who, having failed to get financial freedom, is going to shell out 5,000 of money they apparently don’t have?). But it is a nice idea, and could catch on.
It is a valid point but we’re not too worried if everyone that fails a pledge doesn’t donate money to charity. We won’t come chasing anyone around. It’s only when absolutely no-one donates that it becomes a bit pointless for us as well as charities. We suppose time will tell.
