‘Injury time’ for 2018 resolutions

Let us be honest with each other. Many of us have not achieved much against what we set out as our resolutions for the year 2018! You are lucky if you have achieved half of your plans. You are even luckier if not special if you have completed three quarters of your goals for 2018. Many will have done far less than half. But we should not worry too much. Worrying a lot now will not help much. The best is to find a best way forward to mitigate the situation.

One way, I think, that can help is to create extra time for implementing the goals that are not yet completed. We could give ourselves say three extra months of dedicated execution of the remnant actions of 2018. This means that our resolution year will continue until the 31st of March 2019! This is not strange at all. Many companies extend deadlines for key and important tasks. For instance, it is common for companies and their HR teams to give staff a three month extended period during which they are expected to consume the leave days of the previous year.

The question is- what will you do in the three months? Secondly, how will you ensure that you achieve in three months what you failed to achieve in 12 months? What will change? What will be different this time around? Otherwise, do not expect any different results. Unless there is a genuine change in strategy and approach.

Perhaps the first change will be the mindset. Determination. You need elevated levels of determination. The Go-getter spirit. That tells you that no matter what, you are set to achieve your remnant goals. With this, you couple the meticulous planning before implementation and meticulous attention to detail during implementation, including monitoring and evaluation.

Therefore, let us extend our deadline for the 2018 resolutions and resolve to implement those great ideas in the next three months before we embark on new ones. After all, being a crash programme, it means that we will be implementing big actions rapidly. This will help us learn to achieve more in less time. This will help us to manage the 2019 resolutions in the nine months from April to December 2019. This is so because in order to focus, we cannot start implementing 2019 resolutions while we are closing off the remnant 2018 actions. We failed to implement the actions in 12 months and so we cannot do so in three months in addition to new resolutions. We need ample time and space during the extended period to achieve this.

For this to be possible, we need very thorough monitoring and evaluation methodologies and process. But this can be basic. We simply need to break down our remnant actions into small chunks and allocate time for each of the actions. On a daily basis, we should check what we are doing that day and week. And keep watching and tracking performance and deliver against the plans. If we do this daily, we are bound to complete the remnant actions in the three months ahead.

Of course, we will have to make a lot of sacrifices to achieve this. We may have to spend less time on leisure and fun during this period. If we used to watch a lot of football games on television, we may have to limit that to only the big games and not all games beamed on TV. If we liked to chat with friends for hours on end every day, we may have to now limit that to less than half the time, and so on.

Good luck as you embark on the extended period for implementation of the 2018 resolutions. This way, you are bound to not only achieve the 2018 goals but also with the same momentum, potentially stand a greater chance of achieving your goals for 2019. This way, you will rise and shine twice! Good luck!