Going to the gym. Eating healthier. Smoking less. Figuring out what your niece means when she says you’re “giving boomer.” There’s no end to the resolutions we make every new year.

No matter your goals, psychologists say the “fresh start” approach is a great way to achieve them—including goals you feel slipping away before the calendar even flips to February.

What is a fresh start?

It’s the concept of choosing a landmark date (for example, the start of a new year) instead of one with less meaning for starting a new goal.

• In one study, researchers offered university employees the opportunity to choose between increasing their contributions to a savings plan immediately or at a specified future point in time connected to a “fresh start” date. That framing increased the likelihood that the recipient would choose to increase contributions at that future point in time without decreasing their likelihood of increasing contributions immediately.
• Participants in another study who were given a landmark date instead of a random one were likelier to start a new goal.

Temporal landmarks work because they allow you to distance yourself from the “old” you and create a “new” one. Or, to put it in terms from one of the aforementioned studies, “People’s strengthened motivation to begin pursuing their aspirations following such temporal landmarks originates in part from the psychological disassociation these landmarks induce from a person’s past, imperfect self.”

Avoidance vs. approach

Now that you’ve set your goal on your landmark date (New Year’s), how you pursue it will go a long way toward whether you achieve it. There are generally two ways to tackle the goals you’ve set for yourself—and one yields more success than the other.

• Avoidance goals: While this works well when it comes to your ex, it’s not how you want to attack resolutions. Avoidance goals include “stop eating sweets” or “watch less TV.”
• Approach goals: Instead of avoiding a behavior, you create a new one. Your goals would be “eating more vegetables” or “reading more books” to replace the habits you want to shake.

A recent study found that approach goals are more likely to be accomplished (59%) than avoidance goals (47%) across a wide range of potential resolutions.

The year-end employee review always feels the same: There’s a self-evaluation (“I crushed it this year”), an employer evaluation (“You need to stop microwaving fish in the office”), and then the boss gives the employee mostly unattainable goals for the upcoming year.

Reviews in general aren’t very effective at motivating employees. According to a Gallup poll, only 14% of employees “strongly agreed” that a performance review inspired them to improve.

But in recent years, some workplaces have changed how they conduct performance reviews—or abandoned them altogether.

• A decade ago, Microsoft disbanded its version of stack ranking, the practice pioneered by General Electric CEO Jack Welch in the 1980s in which the company would rank every employee. Experts say it hurts morale and can create a toxic work culture.
• Netflix has around 10,000 employees but has eschewed the year-end review for informal conversations during the year.
• Google revamped its system last May by reducing performance reviews from twice to once a year.
• Apple dropped performance reviews completely.

Employees want feedback, but it has to be useful. Fortune analyzed two years of performance reviews for 13,000 workers and found low-quality feedback is why employees are fleeing companies. According to the survey, about 61% of respondents who plan to stay within their organization say they understand what their manager expects; among people planning to leave their organizations, only 21% feel that way. “Insufficient feedback” was named by 17% of respondents as the primary reason they’re looking for other roles.

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For specific tips on how to set goals, we spoke to Sahil Bloom, a writer, investor, and speaker extraordinaire who thinks deeply about these concepts and shares them on social media and in his newsletter, the Curiosity Chronicle.

Below is an excerpt from our conversation, which offers excellent advice on goal-setting frameworks, how to stay committed to your goals, and which kinds of goals to avoid at all costs.

What framework do you use to set goals?

The first thing you want to do is establish the categories you’ll be building goals around.

I segment this into three buckets: (1) Personal, (2) Professional, and (3) Health. Within each bucket, I try to begin with the end in mind: What are my Major Goals for this area? They should be ambitious, but not ridiculous.

I think of the Major Goals as the summit of the mountain. From there, I work backward and establish what I call Checkpoint Goals. If Major Goals are the summit, Checkpoint Goals are the mid-climb campsites along the way—you can’t reach the summit without going through them. Checkpoint Goals provide a fixed set of points to stop and adjust as necessary along the climb.

Finally, I always establish Anti-Goals, which are the things we *don’t* want to happen along the way. To continue the analogy, you want to reach the summit (your Major Goals), but not at the expense of losing your toes, sanity, or life (your Anti-Goals). To establish Anti-Goals, ask yourself: “What are the worst possible outcomes that could occur through my pursuit of my Major Goals?” You want to avoid those!

What’s your advice to people who think to themselves, “I’d love to set some goals, but I’m not sure what those goals should be”?

Goal setting can be an intimidating exercise—life is big and broad. Segmenting your life into a few buckets—personal, professional, and health, for example—can really help deconstruct the intimidation. Within each of those areas, what “more” do you believe you are meant for? Fundamentally, goal setting is about a belief that you are meant for more. Identifying that “more” is what this all comes down to. If you can get specific around that, you will have your Major Goals in front of you.

What is the No. 1 mistake you see people make when setting goals?

The No. 1 mistake I see is people tying their future happiness to the achievement of some goal. How many times have you assumed that your lasting happiness was on the other side of some goal (a promotion, a pay raise, another degree, etc.)? How many times have you been proven wrong in this assumption?

The Arrival Fallacy is the term used to describe the false assumption that achieving a goal will create lasting happiness in our lives. It’s a “When, Then” psychology that says, “When I achieve X, then I’ll be happy.” The reality is that achievement is not a lasting source of happiness. Our natural wiring (hedonic adaptation) keeps us running—we reset to the baseline and start wondering what comes next. These goals become how we define success for ourselves and our lives. Achieving the last big goal is never enough, as we simply reset our scoreboard and need to achieve the next goal to feel like a success. By defining our success on the basis of these extrinsic goals, we set ourselves up for unhappiness.

Are there any specific tools that make the goal-setting process easier?

I’m an old-school paper and pen guy. I keep it very simple. I love a good pocket notebook for tracking things on a daily basis, and I use a simple 3x5 notecard for most of my daily priorities and to-do lists. It works for me, but you have to find what works for you. Notion and other software tools have some pretty neat downloadable templates that can be used and that may be a fit for the more process-oriented folks out there!

Read the full interview here.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” It’s a common question asked of children and can lead to goal setting at a very young age. When that child grows up to achieve that career goal, it’s usually celebrated and used as an example of how setting a goal works.

But sometimes, being extremely goal-oriented can have negative consequences. Experts have offered warning signs and solutions to help you avoid setting goals for yourself or your child that can be self-debilitating.

• Deliberate practice vs. sampling period: This applies to setting goals for children, such as in sports or careers. Deliberate practice emphasizes specialization and focusing on one particular skill (only playing one sport, for example). Sampling period theory argues it’s better to explore interests, gain diverse skills, and discover true passions before committing to a specialization in a rapidly changing world.
• Pursue excellence, not goals: That’s the philosophy of former NFL linebacker and current TV personality Emmanuel Acho, who says goal setting did more harm than good for him. When Acho was told in college he would never be a first-round pick, he used that as motivation. However, he wasn’t selected in the NFL draft until the sixth round, which he says crushed his self-esteem and hindered his on-field performance. By shifting his mindset, Acho became more open to other career paths, which allowed him to accept a broadcasting job in 2015.

Setting unattainable goals can wreck mental health. Letting go of a goal can feel like giving up and can cause people to feel undeserved shame. A 2022 study published in the journal Motivation and Emotion found that the greater the number of frozen goals people had on their plate, the more they experienced symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression. The study also found that increased anxiety was associated with goal unattainability and that being committed to a highly unattainable goal was linked to a higher risk of depressive symptoms.

This week, we’re bringing you the most-clicked links from the Recs section across the entire year.

Look: The 100 best photographs ever taken without Photoshop.

Fashion tip: The Levi’s CEO on how often you should wash your jeans.

Improve: How to change your life—one tiny step at a time.

Empathize: Here is the most embarrassing tombstone in history.

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