You are doing New Year's resolutions wrong. Have systems, not goals.

Every day, it gets a little easier. But you gotta do it every day, that's the hard part.

This is the quote that changed my mindset at the time to approach my goals.

We have all developed ways to get more productive but in many occasions we seem to forget that what moves us foward is to actually act, to get things done, every day. We put too much emphasis in the goals and too little in the process that should help us achieve them.

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. J. Clear

Your system makes the difference. For example, I set the goal to read 40 books in 2019 by reading a little bit every day. In the end, I struggled to finish the 28th. At first, it felt like disappointment for a failed challenge, but then I realized that the true challenge was to read every day, and at that, I've done amazingly good!

While I only read 10 books in 2018, I read 28 in 2019! That's almost 3 times more! What changed? I successfully formed the habit to read every day.

Now that I know what reading 28 books feels like, I know I can reach 40 in 2020.

That's why before you commit to New Resolutions in the wrong way, you should make sure to focus on the right system:

Start with your identity: Who do you want to become? What really motivates you to wake up every morning?
Outline these thoughts into goals. Make sure they align with the conclusions you got from 1.
Break each goal down into a list of achievable daily actions.
Make them so ridiculously small it's easier for you to do them than to bear with the thought of not having done them. I.e "do 1 push-up", "write 300 words", "read 1 page".
Do it every day.
For a very long time. Chain as many days in a row and do not increment until it's become easy enough. Consistency beats sporadic outbursts of motivation.

For the last 3 years, I've worked to distill all these concepts (and some more!) into a simple and beautiful application called everyday.app to make it easier for everyone of us to put this system intro practice, EVERY DAY!

Hope this helps some of you make the best of this new decade :) Happy new year!