New years resolution success rate

The New York Times have published an article discussing how most people fail to attain their new years goals. Using Oprah as exhibit A, who is once again trying to lose weight after yo-yoing between weights many times, the article cites research that says 80% of all people will fail their new years resolution by Valentines day. The article goes on to suggest that the best way to ensure that resolutions are maintained is to focus on big goals but also make sure that the goal has small accomplish-able steps that allow you to quickly get into a positive feedback mode.

The advice in the article on how to accomplish goals is really quite similar to the programming process. When setting out on a big project the first steps I take is to start with an easy obvious feature and build on that. Whenever I decide forgo caution and implement a big or complicated piece of functionality without intermediate testing I am quickly plagued by hard to discover bugs hidden in the many lines of untested code that was just typed.

For daily life the same restrictions apply. People are not perfect and the way we implement solutions is even less so. Without setting smaller goals that lead to a big picture change we won't know how well we are doing and whether we need to revise our strategy to keep progressing towards our end goal. Conversely if we only set small goals the whole self improvement process can seem trivial and pointless as the end result becomes no real change at all.