Sticking to New Year’s Resolutions is Just a Problem Solving Process

I’m not one for doing New Year’s Resolutions because most of the time they are thrown out nonchalantly and never looked at in-depth by the person. Instead I am about setting goals.

Goals that actually get attained have 5 things (Thanks, Dave Ramsey!):

1) Time limit
2) Very specific
3) Need to be in writing
4) They need to be your own (not what someone else wishes you would be or do)
5) Able to chunk into daily/weekly goals

Instead of saying “I want to blog more this year,” my goal is “I want to have 100 new blog posts by December 31, 2015” AND I am writing it down.  While I wrote it down, I also needed to chunk that goal into smaller goals to check my progress along the way (100 blog posts means at least 2 blog posts each week).  So now my large goal has become smaller goals of posting every Wednesday and Saturday in order to get 2 blog posts in each week which will get me above my goal of 100 posts in the year.

Now how does all of that relate to Problem Solving??  This morning I was reading a book talking about Pôlya’s four step plan for problem solving and thought it fits so nicely with goal setting as well as solving math problems:

1) Understand the problem

2) Devise a plan

3) Carry out the plan

4) Look back

So, Happy New Year’s to you and if you stated some New Year’s Resolutions I challenge you to turn them into Goals.  Dig deep to understand your true goal for this year (not a blanket statement of “I want to blog more”), set the time limit so that you can devise a plan to get your goal completed on time, do those steps, and then look back and see if you accomplished what you hoped and what your next steps will be.