‘Injury time’ for 2023 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 2023!

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 this year. 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. The two months we have to the end of the year can be considered as ‘injury time’ to make up for the lost time.

One way, I think, that can help is to squeeze the remaining two months for implementing the goals that are not yet completed.  This means that we have to double our efforts for the remaining period to complete the backlog of the resolutions plus the actions that were already planned for the two remaining months.

The question is- what will you do in the two months? Secondly, how will you ensure that you achieve in two months what you failed to achieve in past 10 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.  We may end up with no new deliverables or results or very little to show for rest of the year.

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 combine the backlog actions and the activities originally planned for the last two months of this year together and work hard to complete both sets of actions. 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 2024 resolutions better from January. We will have learnt how to rapidly implement planned actions. Additionally, we will go into the new year with a momentum of action and delivery.

This means that the crash programme we are setting up for the next two months has additional benefits for the 2024 resolutions.

For this to be possible, we need very thorough monitoring and evaluation methodologies and processes. But this can be basic. We simply need to break down our backlog of actions into small chunks and do the same with the actions originally planned for the last two months of the year.

Then, we should 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 all the actions in the two 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 television. 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 a crash programme to clear the backlog of 2023 resolutions that are behind schedule so that you can close the year on a good note and enter the new year on a positive note with great momentum of delivery and results.

This way, you are bound to not only achieve the 2023 goals but also with the same momentum, potentially stand a greater chance of achieving your goals for 2024 next year.

This way, you will rise and shine twice! Good luck!