Track Your Commitment, Not Progress, to Achieve Your Resolutions

It’s standard advice to track what steps you have accomplished towards your goal. But that progress can trick you into thinking you can get away with cheating now. Avoid “the progress trap” by questioning your commitment to the goal.

In his New Year’s Resolutions Guidebook, Chris Bailey takes this lesson from The Willpower Instinct. Since tracking progress can trick your brain into cheating, stop looking at it as progress:

View your actions as evidence that you are committed to your goal. After you make positive steps toward a goal, ask yourself: “how committed do you feel toward that goal?” Don’t ask yourself how much progress you’ve made toward it.

Monitoring your progress is good, but you need to keep your eye on the big prize. So to think in terms of the larger goal, question your commitment to the goal, don’t count the small steps.

Bailey’s little guidebook is a pretty good start if you are serious about accomplishing one of your new year’s resolutions, so you might want to check that out in detail.

New Year’s Resolutions Guidebook | A Life of Productivity

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