Skip the New Year’s resolution. Make a next-week resolution. Smaller targets get hit.

A twelve month target has one fatal design flaw: nothing checks in. You cannot tell in March whether it is working, so you get all the feedback at once in December, and by then there is nothing to adjust. A seven day target reports back on Sunday.

So pick one thing and give it until next weekend. Run three times, read twenty pages a night, phone your grandmother once. On Sunday decide whether to keep it, shrink it, or swap it, and then set the next seven days.