Don’t Make a 2025 Resolution, Make Four!

When the mind leads, the body follows, and short-term resolutions lead to long-term success.

Up until mid-December, my weight seemed reasonable. It had crept up each month since September, but I convinced myself that lifting weights since August meant I simply suffered from building sexy muscle.

Then a couple of days ago, holiday reality struck like a spiked-eggnog hangover.

With all the holiday festivities—booze, sweets, and savory delights everywhere—I had dropped my daily ritual of stepping on the scale. And when we stop monitoring, what happens? We stop managing.

A year ago, in my essay "Tis the Season for Resolutions," I observed that the body often serves as the focus of New Year's resolutions. People declare they will finally hit the gym frequently, eat cleaner, and cut alcohol (at least for January).

Body mastery seems tempting because the body hijacks our best intentions: it floods us with cravings when we're stressed, makes the couch irresistible when we consider the gym, and seduces us with thoughts like, One more glass of wine won't hurt.

But, I argued, there is no such thing as body mastery without first achieving mind mastery.

training the puppy

When you hear "mastering the mind," you might imagine monks meditating on mountaintops, or, Aang’s frustrations while training to master the remaining elements in The Last Airbender.

Not the real objective for mere mortals like you and me.

A more practical and grounded form of mind mastery reminds me of training a puppy.

A puppy's attention ricochets between every passing butterfly, car, or squirrel. (For kittens, the same applies, but add a red laser point.) But with patient, consistent practice, the puppy learns to focus, to resist distractions, to respond rather than react.

There’s a video on the internet that shows a dog dismissing distractions of various balls until the correct ball is thrown at it. That’s focus. That’s a trained mind.

Mind mastery means the ability to say no to temptations, to focus on a task, to let emotions inform but not take over. It means navigating life strategically, responding to challenges with clarity rather than reacting impulsively. And just like training a puppy requires structured, manageable training sessions rather than marathon lessons, mastering our minds works best when we break our goals into smaller, focused periods.

the new year’s resolution trap

What happens when you resolve that for the next 52 weeks you will go to the gym 5 times a week?

Life. Life is what happens.

By the third week of January, life throws you off schedule. January hasn’t expired yet, yet a resolution for twelve months is definitively unachievable.

There are two things we can do about that.

First, build flexibility into the goals. Instead of “hit the gym five times a week”, we can aim for 15 minutes of physical activity every day, with a preference of three of them at the gym. Or 45 minutes of physical activity, anywhere. As my friend Maksim, author of The Quandary,¹ told me recently, scheduling something for every day of the week becomes easier to follow than scheduling it only for some days of the week. What can be different though is the intensity. For instance, I can schedule exercise every day for 45 minutes, but Sundays and Wednesdays it can be a walk on the beach.

Furthermore, apply this goal to only 48 of the 52 weeks. If you hit all 52, amazing—but the goal is only 48. In other words, build forgiveness into the system. Throughout the year, we can up the ante for a single week, when we think the goal is achievable. If we fail, the week failed, not the whole year.

And, second, let me now reverse all that: ditch the year-long resolution altogether. Why would 12 months be the right duration for goal-setting? Many software engineering organizations found that re-prioritizing the work-backlog every two weeks (a common duration they call a sprint) helps stakeholders remain informed and satisfied, while longer goals span three month periods.

why have one when you can have four

There are many models for this, such as quarterly objectives or 12 Week Year.

The basic form is select a 12 week period, and apply your flexible goals to that period. Could be Sunday, Jan 5, 2025, to Saturday, March 29, 2025, then add a week for reflection and start again. Or go from winter solstice to spring equinox, then start again

It’s serendipitous that 52 weeks can be evenly split into four 13-week periods.

Furthermore, here’s how to keep the goals flexible:

• mindfulness

  • minimum: 12 minutes of practicing meditation per day, 4 days per week

  • aspirational: 60 minutes daily, 7 days a week

• active lifestyle

  • minimum: 15 minutes of physical activity, even as simple as a walk, every day

  • aspirational: 30 minutes 4-6 times at the gym

Even if you can’t keep up with the minimum, all you lost is one quarter, not a whole year.

check in at twelve weeks

When the mind commands, the body obeys.

Quarterly resolutions, anchored in mindful discipline rather than rigid rules, translate to personal growth. Breaking the year into manageable chunks creates space for reflection and adjustment. Sustainable change results from that, twelve weeks at a time.

Businesses have always aimed to improve productivity, developing methods that apply to the individual as well. Quarterly objectives have been concretizing annual goals.

Recently I was briefly introduced to the idea of the “12 Week Year”, a paradigm proposed by Moran and Lennington. Have you practiced this? What has been your experience?

Hepis, Leo. “Tis the Season for Resolutions: Body Mastery, or Mind Mastery?” Surprisingly Coherent, 3 Jan. 2024, surprisinglycoherent.substack.com/p/tis-the-season-for-resolutions.

Moran, Brian P., and Michael Lennington. The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks Than Others Do in 12 Months. Wiley, 2013.

1. quandarylabs.substack.com