It’s that time of year again. It’s become a bit of an annual tradition. I started setting goals for myself a few years ago. And whilst I have not hit all of them, I have achieved more than I feel I would have had I not set any. Usually in this type of article I talk about how to set goals, usually drawing on what I have learnt about the practice throughout the past year; what has worked, what hasn’t.

New Year’s resolutions have an interesting reputation. How often do you hear self-help gurus, influencers, tech bros and grind happy people talk them up? And there’s plenty of methods out there to help people set goals. One google search alone brings up article, after article, after article. And soon enough we get the chaser that is the sense of failure when these goals fall through.



But this year, I thought it would be interesting to interrogate why setting goals can be helpful, even important, even if you fail to meet them. Hopefully this will help you create more effective personal goals for 2025 and allow you to give yourself grace when obstacles appear.

Why I set goals

I am a to-do-list person. If I don’t have a list, I am immediately unfocused. And when I am unfocused I don’t get anything done. At least, not effectively. I also stew in the sense of guilt that I am unfocused and currently not getting anything done. It’s not a great state for me to be in. But once I have that list, I know what to do and more often than not it gets done. It also prevents that guilt build up because I did the thing on the list.

Goals are my to-do-list for the year. It functions the same way as my everyday lists. They give me that sense of progression I need to keep my mind limber and happy. And they do it in a very interesting way.

Goals retrain my brain

I like to divide my goals into habits I want to establish and projects I want to finish. This helps me distinguish what behaviours I have to change vs tasks I want to tick off. I find this helps me determine what I have to change in my everyday life in order to establish a new ritual because the thing about habits is that you have to keep up that behaviour, on a daily basis until the brain assigns that behaviour to auto-pilot mode. In fact, I ran a little experiment to see if this effect was actually possible.

In the last quarter of the year, I wrote down that I would like to keep the kitchen clean all the time. This felt like a daily uphill battle for me. I love food, but I don’t like cleaning the kitchen. It’s always the last room in the house that I touch when I clean and come inspection time, my husband would nominate himself to clean it while I did the other rooms as he knew how much of a roadblock it used to be for me.

But I wanted to change that. I took stock of the room and isolated one chore to build a habit around. And that chore was stacking and putting on the dishwasher before I went to sleep at night. I timed it to see how long it would take to do the chore, which was not long it turned out. I then used that knowledge to convince myself to go stack it every night. I didn’t have to do the whole kitchen. Just that one, small chore. I put in my earbuds, whacked on a podcast or music and before I knew it the kitchen was clean.

This small habit, by introducing a small task that could be done quickly meant that the kitchen was getting cleaned more often. I didn’t clean it every day, but I now have built up a habit of putting on the dishwasher at night, most often without me even realising I’m doing it. The habit has now been upgraded to auto-pilot.

I think about this often when I’m trying to establish a new habit. I’ve proven to myself that yes it does indeed work.

A little progress is still progress

I often don’t meet the goals I set for myself at the beginning of a year. Sometimes my priorities change throughout the year, life happens, health crises happen. But working towards an outcome I want to achieve for myself means that even if I don’t get over the line in the timeframe I was hoping for, I am on the way to getting there more so than if I had not tried at all. And here’s the thing. If I keep going, I often get to cross that thing off my list.

This is the most important part of setting goals. You set goals that will give you direction and focus. If a year is too much, try working in smaller periods such as six months or in quarter periods. I use quarterly goals as it takes advantage of my brain’s tendency to not kick into gear until the last minute.

We can put a lot of pressure on ourselves when it comes to New Years resolutions. But, at the end of the day, your goals, your focus, your direction, are there to aid you rather than pull you down.

Hopefully this exploration helped you in some ways.

Onwards and upward into 2025. See you all on the other side!

What are your goals going into this new year? Let us know below!

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