Health and well-being related resolutions most popular
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.
