Welcome to the Design Loft: 2026.
New Years Day, birthdays, high holidays in many religions, and anniversaries often provoke resolutions or commitments to change. Popular topics are weight loss, health promotion, financial wellbeing, travel, and engaging with loved ones — but there are so many more. You might have some set from New Years.
The research is pretty clear that these resolutions often fail, although the degree to which they fail is open to question. When researchers looked at why New Years resolutions (and others) fail, they found that most of the reasons were due to their design.
In this lesson, we’re going to take a look at how to design a better resolution and ensure that this year is one that’s set up to help you — and your patients, clients and teams — acheive more of what you set out for.
Designing Resolutions
A resolution is a statement of intent. It is some variant of this: “In [timeframe] I will [take certain actions] to [achieve certain outcome]” . Recent, longitudinal research suggests some strategies we might consider when framing a resolution.
Oscarsson et al. (2020) found that about half of resolvers sustain change for a full year, especially when goals are framed as approach-oriented (what to do, not what to avoid) when supported with light, well-timed structure such as periodic check-ins or social support. More intensive or overly prescriptive interventions were less effective, suggesting that too much structure can undermine persistence rather than strengthen it .
Woolley, Giurge, and Fishbach (2025) explain why this happens: although people set resolutions for extrinsic reasons (health, money, future benefits), long-term adherence is driven by intrinsic motivation—how enjoyable or engaging the behavior feels in the present. Across cultures and goal types, intrinsic motivation consistently predicted persistence and completion, whereas extrinsic motivation did not. Interventions that increased intrinsic motivation directly improved adherence .
Implication: Sustainable resolutions work best when they are approach-focused, lightly supported, and designed to feel rewarding now, not merely important later. These studies suggest that durable behaviour change comes less from willpower or pressure and more from aligning goals with how people experience motivation in everyday life and designing in light supports along the way.
How To Set Up Success (and Bounce Back from Failure)
Anchoring your goals to activities what you (or your team, patients — whomever you’re seeking to support) like is critical. It’s less about people not liking change, what they dislike is the uncertainty that comes with change. Enjoyable activities make uncertainty attractive, which is why we want to design-in things that people like.
Want to exercise? Anchor it to something social, or outdoors, or connected to watching a favourite show. Want to learn more as a team? Anchor structured learning activities to “coffee time”, bring in food, or tie learning to goals to something that the team enjoys. Rather than simply repeat data points or recount journal articles, there are ways to design-in enjoyment to the process. A success guide or metric is: make it attractive enough so that people 1) look forward to it, and 2) miss it when it is gone. If you can do these things, you know that you’re on the right track.
But what if you put something in place and something derails you? You miss a week? Or you get distracted with other things?
Among the most adaptive advice for when things falter comes from the research from Katy Milkman and colleague on what’s called “The Fresh Start Effect”. The essence of this concept is that key dates are largely arbitrary based on our own sense of personal meaning, and that we can create meaning anytime.
Did your New Years resolution fail? How about treating January 15th as a new, new year? The key is that you can anchor a ‘fresh start’ to any day. It might be date, a day of the week, or just TODAY. There’s nothing special about a birthday, anniversary, or change of calendar that can’t be recreated to support a new start for a goal.
Change By Design
Goals and intentions draw in our focus and attention. Attention is among the most precious resources we have, so why not leverage it to make something special happen.
What are your resolutions? What goal process can you set up that can start today (or Monday, or any day)?
Take these lessons to heart. Let me know how it goes.
Best wishes with your resolutions!
If you want some help, you can always reach out to me.
If you want to design things more fulsomely and get some coaching support, sign up to be a Premium Member and get it included with your membership.
References:
Oscarsson, M., Carlbring, P., Andersson, G., & Rozental, A. (2020). A large-scale experiment on New Year’s resolutions: Approach-oriented goals are more successful than avoidance-oriented goals. PLOS ONE, 15(12), e0234097. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0234097
Woolley, K., Giurge, L. M., & Fishbach, A. (2025). Adherence to personal resolutions across time, culture, and goal domains. Psychological Science, 36(8), 607–621. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976251350960
Image credits: by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash