Perhaps you have already failed at your resolutions for the new year. Perhaps you are still on track. Perhaps you never set any at all. Whatever your situation may be, I want to propose something. Put real numbers on whatever goals you have at present and write them down. If you don’t have any goals, then I encourage you to sit for a few minutes and think about how you want things to be different in three or six months and what might make that world a reality. Vague goals unhelpful. I need numbers, clear benchmarks against which I can measure my progress. Having numbers also makes it clear should I fail. It is this painful possibility that keeps many goals vague, but if failure isn’t possible then success probably isn’t either.

I make my goals visible so that I encounter them several times each day. Maybe it is a desire to avoid cognitive dissonance, but the comparison between the present and the state of the world as posited by those written goals offers a dangling carrot for me to chase. When I sit at my desk, my three overarching goals for the first quarter of this year are staring back at me scrawled in my own poor handwriting on the whiteboard above my desk, a whiteboard purchased for that very reason. I have juggled more than three in the past, but if everything is a priority then nothing is a priority so I am being more selective at present. The three are in different categories—one physical, one financial, and the third personal. All are achievable if only just, the sort of stretch goals that I need.

If you want to just start, start small. Take a half-hour walk once a week without talking on the phone or listening to music or a podcast. Cook a new recipe once every week for a month. Read a chapter of a book each day for two weeks. Whatever it is, aim at something you believe you can achieve, write it down so you can track your success to build positive momentum, and get started. And when you accomplish the task, make that visible too. Get a calendar for the task, use those little stickers teachers put on children’s homework, make a simple string of tally marks, whatever. You will feel better about yourself when you can see how you are stringing together the little victories that will add up to accomplishing your larger goals. We all know that “new year, new you” isn’t a real thing, but that doesn’t mean we can’t each get a little better in the days, weeks, and months ahead.