Dwight Eisenhower believed that “peace-time plans are of no particular value, but peace-time planning is indispensable.”
You’d be forgiven for thinking the precious few days off work this new year would have provided the ideal window of ‘peace-time planning’, before getting back to work.
You’d be mistaken.
New Year’s Resolutions don’t work. The most recent studies reveal that while 38.5% of adults in the U.S. set annual resolutions, only 9% successfully keep them.
One reason our new year’s plans fail so often is that most people feel pressured into creating plans at this arbitrary time.
But January is not really a time of any particular ‘peace’. It is a notoriously difficult time for many.
Up north, dark days affect mood (we’re lucky to get about 7.5 hours at the moment in Edinburgh, less if the clouds are low and heavy).
There’s the inherent fatigue of catching up with family and friends after a few months (or a year) of not seeing them.
There’s the excess of food and drink and increasingly far flung families have to deal with the fatigue of travel and jetlag.
For northern hemisphere educators the winter holidays can feel like an all-too-brief pitstop that barely makes up for the busy-ness of December. In the south, there’s a new school year to prepare.
The best time for “peace-time planning” is up for debate. But it almost certainly isn’t on one particular day (January 1st). It might not even be in January.
So put one foot in front of the other, and get consistently better at what you already do well.
And when the time to plan and set your goals is right, you’ll know it.