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Motivation

Hacking New Year’s Resolutions: Consider Delegation

Can we delegate the follow-through to our New Year's resolutions?

Key points

  • New Year's resolutions are a great tool for goal-setting but have notoriously low follow-through.
  • Delegation can allow us to outsource follow-through, potentially making us more likely to succeed.
  • Delegation requires investing in relationships so that another person would be willing to fill this role.

December is the month when plans are made with great hopes, only to meet their inauspicious endings a few months later. The coming new year provides an opportunity for a psychological break from the past, and millions of people are inspired to set new goals for themselves—eat more healthily, exercise more, invest in close relationships, change financial habits, and start a new business, to name a few examples. The poor success rate of these resolutions is well-known, and many writers have explained the reasons.

There are also solutions to these failings, but most of them require you to find a way to limit your (unwanted) choices in the future. For example, a pre-commitment to setting aside a small amount of money each month, signed at the beginning of the year, would help improve your financial situation. Never stocking your fridge with sweets or deserts can lower your sugar intake. Paying a hefty sum each month for a gym membership can help motivate you to go regularly to avoid “wasting money.” However, as the high failure rate of New Year’s resolution show, the efficacy of these tools is limited.

Here is an idea that has not received much press before: How about delegating goal follow-through?

Here is the logic:

  • It is hard for us to hold ourselves accountable. Other people have no trouble doing so.
  • It is hard for us to avoid blurry wishes and come up with specific goals. Others can do this better for us.
  • It is hard for us to avoid feeling discouraged because of slow progress. Others are not as emotionally involved.
  • It is hard for us to look in the mirror and tell ourselves that we are not making progress because we are too busy making excuses. Others have no such qualms.
  • It is hard for us to succeed without a support system. Others can support us.

This may seem like cheating, because instead of actually conquering our goals ourselves, we are outsourcing the pursuit to others. However, it should be noted that many of the answers that behavioral science provides for these vexing issues revolve around avoiding the psychological forces that create them in the first place. Delegation in this context works on the same mechanism, but with the help of other people.

Examples

Take a common New Year’s resolution: Going to the gym more often and eating better.

Trying to accomplish this goal yourself would involve buying a gym membership, scheduling times to go, figuring out your workout plans, figuring out your preferred diet, getting groceries that fit your diet, and tracking your gym attendance and food intake. These are not easy to tasks to maintain over the long term. It is all too easy to slip up, forget, or feel drained as the busyness of everyday life takes over after the New Year’s optimism fades.

Consider delegation. You hire a personal trainer who writes out your workout routines, plans your diet, and tells you which groceries to buy. He or she asks you to subscribe to a food tracking app, and holds you accountable for making your planned gym workouts and meals. If you fail, your personal trainer calls you out or even charges you more each month.

It is not hard to see that this route has higher chances of success than doing it yourself.

Take another common example: Many people resolve to learn a new language. Working on your own would require you to research classes and books in your intended language, enroll in them, finding speaking groups in which you can practice, fit your schedule around all of these events, and keep track of your progress. Again, these actions involve changing habits and lifestyles. Instead, a personal assistant can do all of these things for you, leaving you with the job of showing up at class and a speaking group to practice your intended language. It seems easier to keep up your studies when you delegate.

This logic can apply to many domains: You will be more likely to start and maintain a blog, build your professional skills, save more money, drink less, cook more, and a host of other goals by using delegation than trying to do everything on your own.

Considerations

Delegation usually doesn’t come freely. The examples above featured paid delegation, whereby you would hire a person to take care of the specific areas in your life that you would like to improve. This of course require financial planning and sound thinking of the tradeoffs of achieving your goals relative to the amount of money delegation would require. Having said this, it is helpful to note that doing things yourself can also be costly—albeit more so in terms of your time and potential failures.

Delegation can also be voluntary. This requires having and investing in personal relationships so that another person would be willing to fill this role. For example, if your goal is to go to the gym more, investing in your relationships with friends or acquaintances who already do so is a form of outsourcing the planning and implementation of this goal to them. If your goal is to improve your work skills, identifying a mentor and convincing him or her to take you on is another example of voluntary delegation. While it is less straightforward to convince others to voluntarily help you in these ways, it may nevertheless be easier than going through the repeated roller coaster of setting New Year’s resolutions with great optimism only to be disappointed by your lack of achievement a few months later.

Overall, despite their high failure rate, New Year’s resolutions are a great time for goal setting. When it comes to implementing your goals, consider delegation.

References

Carden, L., & Wood, W. (2018). Habit formation and change. Current Opinion in Psychology, 20, 117-122.

Dai, H., Milkman, K. L., & Riis, J. (2014). The fresh start effect: Temporal landmarks motivate aspirational behavior. Management Science, 60(10), 2563–2582.

Laibson, D. (1997). Golden eggs and hyperbolic discounting. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 112, 443-477.

Loewenstein, G., John, L., & Volpp, K. G. (2013). Using decision errors to help people help themselves. In E. Shafir (Ed.), The behavioral foundations of public policy (pp. 361–379). Princeton University Press.

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