你会兑现你的新年决心吗？

When it comes to strategies for getting things done, I experiment. In 2020 I was briefly a bullet journaler. I have started (but not yet completed) The Artist’s Way. With awe and suspicion, I watch YouTube creators model perfect lives, wondering if their tips actually work for them. I am powerless against a Sunday reset or a productive-day-in-my-life vlog. When I have a goal to accomplish—say, writing a synthesis of books on a topic—I usually break it into smaller pieces, time-block, and motivate myself with a weird series of rewards. I employ the Pomodoro method. But as the new year approaches, I freeze. I wonder if the goals I’m setting have more to do with my personal ambitions or with the Platonic ideals of the internet. I try to follow creators who post well-rounded, realistic content—for example, Rowena Tsai, whose compassionate approach to productivity I admire, or AmandaRachLee, who brings the playfulness of doodling to her planning videos. We all tend to make resolutions that are aspirational—and thus quickly abandoned. And when societal systems are failing—in the form of widespread isolation and loneliness, wage exploitation and theft, violence, and mass death—it feels harder than ever to maintain a personal one that works. Is there a better way? As 2024 turns to 2025, three new books aim to provide insights. The executive coach Caroline Adams Miller, author of Big Goals, is aware of just how much ink has been spilled on this topic; she has written several books on it herself. She argues, however, that a lot of the existing literature isn’t based on much more than vibes and pop psychology. For instance, she notes that the well-known directive to create “SMART goals”—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound—“can encourage ‘low’ goals without enough guidance to even determine if the goal is a good idea to begin with.” Miller’s book builds on the foundations of goal-setting theory (GST), established in the late 1960s by Edwin Locke and Gary Latham. She also draws from Lillian Moller Gilbreth and Mary Parker Follett, who created work systems that are more attuned to human emotion, collaboration, and community than, say, Taylor’s assembly-line approach, and references Albert Bandura’s self-efficacy theory that believing in your capacity to do something actually helps you do it. Though the science hasn’t changed much since the 20th century, it’s the kind of stuff we often know but struggle to turn into habits. Locke and Latham found that the most effective goals are challenging and specific and can be categorized as either performance goals—which Miller describes as the achievement of “something you already know how to do,” ideally with a checklist of five to seven smaller steps, per Locke and Latham—and learning goals, which require you to gain new skills or knowledge. But what happens when you’re having a bad day or week or year? What if you’re under the thumb of management’s unreasonable expectations? How do structural racism, misogyny, poverty, and the stigma against and lack of care for mental illness affect someone’s resources to set realistic goals? Noting that normative goal-setting approaches have benefited typically white, male power structures, Miller proposes a six-step, 21st-century application of GST called BRIDGE: “Brainstorm every aspect associated with setting a specific goal; Evaluate the relationships you will and won’t need to move forward; Think about the investments you will need to make in yourself; Discern what factors will matter in decision-making; Decide whether or not you have the grit to proceed; and Settle on the definition of excellence you are shooting for and the timeline that will match it.” I love an exercise and a worksheet—and Miller provides good ones—but I struggled to retain all this information. Goal setting itself started to feel like something I needed to learn more about before I could do it well. I then turned to Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s Tiny Experiments, which argues that established methods for goal attainment are too linear and promote fear, toxic positivity, competition, and isolation. Le Cunff points to three mental shifts we must make to replace rigid timelines with “fluid experimentation”: from anxiety to curiosity, from fixed ladders to “growth loops,” and from outcome to process. Instead of thinking about quantitative time, consider qualitative time—that is, whether you’re logging fulfilling experiences on the way to achieving your goal. Le Cunff calls these moments “magic windows: those periods of creative flow that often occur when we are immersed in activities that capture our full attention, when we spend time with loved ones, or when we are engaged in self-reflection.” I also appreciated her “triple check” or “head, heart, hand” method, adapted from the psychologist Hugo Kehr, for identifying the root causes of procrastination: Ask “Is the task appropriate?” (head); “Is the task exciting?” (heart); “Is the task doable?” (hand). These questions can yield the insight needed to identify when and where to change course. And through the concept of growth loops, Le Cunff invites failure or error into the process instead of making it something to avoid at all costs. What if you’re trying Miller’s approach, or Le Cunff’s, or one of the myriad others out there and still feeling stuck? You might pick up Dan Heath’s Reset. Echoing Bandura, Heath notes that it’s important to avoid repeating unsuccessful methods, because “‘I didn’t make progress’ can easily slip into ‘I’m not capable of making progress.’” To combat that, he suggests finding leverage points—“interventions where a little bit of effort yields disproportionate returns”—and restacking resources like time, money, and energy to reap those returns. The first step, he says, is to “go and see the work”—ensure you have not just a functional understanding of how things are done but a systemic one. “Without that,” he writes, “it’s hard to make things better.” After all this investigation, I do think new frameworks can help us apply what science has long held—and that we don’t need to constantly reconfigure, upgrade, and optimize ourselves. Maybe this is what we should do: Have a good breakfast. Get outside. Spend quality time with family or friends. Then make our checklists. Ask ourselves questions and identify where we can make a change. And move further toward our big goal each week or month, finding one small thing to work on to improve our days just a tiny bit.

你会兑现你的新年决心吗？

摘要.

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