Skip New Year's Resolutions. Do this instead.

Set intentions for the New Year to build a life aligned with your values.

Happy first week of 2024! I generally don’t make New Year’s resolutions, but I am a big fan of New Year’s retros and setting intentions for the months ahead.

Starting a new year is a chance to make a hard reset on life and consider what I want the next year to look like, as compared to our last trip around the sun. One simplistic way of approaching a retro is by basic addition and subtraction:

What do I want to be doing more of and less of in the coming 365 days? What do I want to start, and what do I want to stop?

The practice of performing retros is commonplace in organizational settings, so this may be familiar to many of you. But in order to perform a proper life retro, it’s not enough to do simple addition and subtraction. You also need to take it a step further and define what your ideal life looks like, a life aligned with your values.

A value-aligned life can mean different things to different people depending on where you are in your career, private life, social life, age, health, and many other factors. It's important to note that the practice of defining a life aligned with your values is meant to be fluid and exploratory - no New Year's resolution guilt here.

As we kick off 2024, here are some non-negotiable elements I’ve determined to be part of my value-aligned life. Of course, this list isn't meant to be exhaustive and could easily grow to 100 or more. Yours most likely will be different, but I’m hoping my short list will spur some ideas of your own.

Here we go!

1. Optimize for experiences that will add richness to life. Avoid the default urge towards overt consumerism. Not everything good in life has to involve a credit card.
2. Reduce my material footprint. Buy less, repurpose more, purge often, donate regularly. Owning less offers us incredible freedom, whether you are in pursuit of a life of minimalism or simply want to clean out that garage or storage space.
3. Be a relationship cultivator, not a relationship collector. Focus on building deeper relationships rather than transactional relationships. Avoid the urge to keep running on the tireless hamster wheel of mindlessly gaining more connections.
4. Be scrupulous in time management. Stop wasting time on things that won’t matter in the long run and develop an ironclad filter for making tough decisions more efficiently. Truly embrace the concept of memento mori in daily life.
5. Stop being a victim of the sunk cost fallacy. Know when to let go of things that are no longer feeding you and move on to new pursuits. There is no shame in walking away from unfinished work if it's keeping you from greater things.
6. Commit to commitment. Live up to promises I made to people in my life, both personally and professionally. When I say I’m going to do something, follow through. Otherwise, don’t commit in the first place.
7. Take more risks. Life slows down for no one. Don’t let your ego keep you from trying new things or pursuing that idea you can’t get out of your head. A life well lived will be full of mistakes and challenges, but punctuated by immense rewards.
8. Adopt a “body of work” mindset. Aim to become more of a producer than a consumer. From a personal context, this means being additive with my creative pursuits around writing, art, and music, all areas in life I've become more passionate about that feed and nourish me when I most need it.

Those are just a few desires I came up with for the New Year, but again, I could easily draft 100 or more.

All of these factors I’ve outlined require me to be intentional, meaning they don’t just happen. I have to make them happen. Each of them also aligns to a value I hold closely: building meaningful relationships, honoring commitment, reducing my material impact, valuing my time, etc.

Now it's your turn.

Create your own list and be intentional about aligning your desires with your values. When practicing addition and subtraction, ask yourself, "Why is this important to me? Does it give me what I need? Is it essential?"

Next, ask how you are going to accomplish each item on your list. Get as granular as you need to based on your own motivation and ability to fulfill commitments. If necessary, find a model of goal setting and decision-making that fits your style, whether David Allen 's classic methodology of Getting Things Done or Tiago Forte 's incredible Building a Second Brain.

For some, this exercise might start to look like a set of New Year’s resolutions. And, that’s ok. But the primary emphasis I would make is to not get caught up in the semantics of grand resolutions you may or may not stick to, and be values-based around the life you envision for the next year. Take the time to challenge your own assumptions by asking ‘why’ and ‘how,’ while retaining the permission to revise your list along the journey.

You are more likely to stick to intentions built around your values than generic annual declarations.

In closing, I encourage you to take a moment to pause and consider drafting a handful of non-negotiable factors you would propose for a value-based life in the new year. What are you going to do more of? What are you hoping to do less of? Why are your choices important to you? How are you going to take the first step in achieving each one?

Start with your values and see where they take you.