It's Already 1 Month in to the New Year: Here's How to Make Your Resolutions Actually Work

I remember my first New Year's resolutions. I was five years old, and my mother recorded a video with the family asking everyone what their wishes were for the coming year. When it was my turn, I replied with great determination that I wanted to eat lots of chocolate cake that year. Luckily, that goal came true with impressive clarity.

More than a decade later, my goals have become much more “adult”: getting a certain grade, passing a certain college entrance exam, getting promoted at organization X. And the truth is that our New Year's resolutions often border on the absurd. We believe that with the new year we change our DNA and are replaced by a mega-efficient and focused robot.

The truth is that we remain the same old people we were a month ago, but that doesn't mean we are any less capable of reinventing ourselves.

Know What is Most Important to You

Start with a short list: What do I want 2026 to bring me?

The answers need to be concrete things like keeping your grades above B, learning to roller skate, reading 40 books. Things you can clearly visualize.

Another idea is to organize your desires by areas of life such as social, health, academic, and leisure. It's a good idea to keep an average of three reasonable goals in each area, nothing too impossible or that contradicts other goals. That way, it's easier to know where that goal fits into your daily life.

But before writing down your desires, think about why you want to do them. For those who don't know where they want to go, any path will do. But when we know what we want, we just need to be consistent, and we will have the full capacity to achieve it.

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Break Down Your Goal into Smaller Targets

If Rome wasn't built in a day, don't expect your new six-pack abs and perfect report card to appear overnight. To achieve something, you need to be consistent.

But discipline is very difficult, especially nowadays, with so many distractions at our fingertips. That's why it's important to set some periodic targets so that our goals don't seem so distant and are easier to achieve. Start with long-term goals: 6 months, then 3 months, weekly goals, and finally daily goals.

For example, if at the end of the year you want to run a 26-mile marathon, by the middle of the year you need to be running 13 miles, so in three months, it's good to run 6.5. But in the first week, you can run 1.24 miles a day.

It is important that the weekly goal is more established than the daily goal, because unforeseen events happen, and sometimes we are unable to run on a specific day, but if we have a specific distance for that week, we can make up for the missed day by dividing it among the rest of the week.

Create a Routine that Works for You

How many times have we created routines that are perfect in theory, beautiful and organized, so cohesive and ideal for our goals, but in practice have proven to be nothing more than a useless piece of paper?

The reason for this is quite simple: it wasn't right for you. Each person has their own rhythm, and the same routine does not work for everyone. Some people need more hours of sleep or more time to eat their meals. You may work better with a strict routine where you know what to do every hour of the day, or you may just need small daily goals written down on a list, with no specific schedule for anything.

This is where our key to successful New Year's resolutions comes in: self-knowledge. Think about when you function best during the day and things that have worked for you before. For example, I've noticed that when my routines are nicely organized, I'm much more likely to stick to them. If you're the same, Notion is an interesting option for organization.

Make your Resolutions Visual

This is more of a tip than a mandatory step. But it's good to have something to look at with admiration when you're tired from working so hard. Like in those coming-of-age movies and series from the early 2000s, where the characters always had murals with college flags and things like that.

But a wall mural isn't the only idea available. You can make mood boards and use them as backgrounds on your phone and computer, create folders on Pinterest, keep a goal journal, among countless other ideas.

Another good idea is to create a playlist for 2026, with several songs that convey the energy and aesthetic you want for the new year.

It's important that we can see our goals; it helps us remember that they are tangible things and that one day we can get there.

Don't Forget that You are Still Human

A new year is many things: a fresh start, an opportunity to reinvent ourselves, the prospect of more chocolate. But one thing it is not is a guarantee that we will be flawless. Making mistakes is a certainty.

That doesn't mean we should get discouraged; it just means we'll be a little wiser than we were before. Because the new year begins with the decision to be a better person than last year.