A few days before the end of 2013, my daughter, who would be Secondary 2 school student in 2014, asked me if I had prepared my 2014 resolutions. I just realized I haven’t put much thought about it, and to make things worse, I didn’t even remember my 2013 resolutions. I scrambled around my stuffs and dug out a heap of old paper notebooks scanning every page like a mad man, yet to no avail. I hastily jumped to my smartphone and tablet, and launched Evernote, Springpad, Day One, plus any other note-taking apps I collected, hoping to find my holy grail called 2013 Resolutions, and I failed big time. I threw in the towel and admitted that I failed to keep proper documentation, or even worse, I may not even have one. No big deal I said to myself, life still needs to go on, it’s just that I miserably missed the feeling of accomplishment, the excitement of ticking off that square box attached to each of my personal goals.

The next day I found myself writing down my sets of goals for 2014 like I used to do in yesteryears, except 2013 (sigh). Some key guidelines of making good targets or resolutions came to my mind. The same principles in business goal settings can be applied to personal life.

The first and foremost is the goal should be realistic and achievable. Setting up your own business and making it as successful as Apple in one year is simply unrealistic, an undertaking that even Steve Jobs didn’t manage to achieve. In personal life, it can be the realistic increase in quantity and quality of what you have been doing so far, for example “Increase the number of books I read in a year to 30, fifty percent addition to last year”.

The goal should be measurable and have a timeline. Putting “Have a happier and healthier life” as your personal goal is an empty can that makes loud sound because there is nothing in it. Instead, you can break it into smaller and measurable targets that contribute to your happier and healthier life, such as “Take a two-week off from work during June school holiday and go to beautiful beach in an exotic country with my family” or “Run a half marathon in less than two hours by Oct 2014”. It can be as simple as “aim to drink eight glasses a day by March 2014” or “stop a nail-peeling habit by August 2014”

The last and yet equally important is documentation. I used to put all of these in a piece of paper and paste it on my wardrobe inner wall. My wife and children had access to it and many times they reminded me of my goals, especially those “holiday” parts. This paper was my placard and eventually can be my badge of honours as I ticked off every accomplishment plus the great feeling that comes with it. Alternatively you can make use of many apps dotted around in your smartphone and tablet to document your resolutions. This didn’t work out well for me due to my tendency to move around apps and try some new and recommended apps. More often than not, my notes got scattered in the process.

At the end of the day, plan without execution is an empty plan. Before we embark in this resolution-making stuff, we’d better make sure that we have the internal flame to go through it and achieve it. Each of us must have this strong eagerness of achievement and long for the satisfied feeling of reaching the peak of the mountain after one-year of hard efforts. Without this, the new year resolution is nothing but a piece of paper which soon would be collecting the dust.

Let’s start the new year with resolution to remember that we have resolutions.