The best time to start was last year. The second best time to start is right now.

– Seth Godin

A New Year’s Resolution is an oath of mediocrity. They’re a big favourite with the One More Crowd: One More book, One More blog post, One More hour of internet forums, One More paycheque, One More day to relax, One More month to clear their head is all they need before getting started. To the chronic procrastinator, one plus one somehow keeps equalling one, but there’s no better time to break out of the rut than January 1st.

A New Year’s Resolution is a call to inaction. It’s a commitment to change your life…later. Why do we do this? Why do we all choose to point our procrastination at the same day, and even still miss the target?

First, it may be a sign that your goal is too big. Losing 100 pounds is pretty frickin’ hard to do, but it’s no problem for a tomorrownator. Delayed action is a psychoactive drug. The knowledge that you’re going to change your life in amazing ways, starting in a few weeks or months, deposits an effortless euphoria into your consciousness. Consider, for example, how many people say things like “I plan to be a millionaire within five years”, as if their business plan were built on aimless internet reading and empty Coke cans. But, hey, it sure sounds good.

On the other end of the spectrum, it may be that your goal is too small, or that it’s a goal for which you’re insufficiently motivated. For example, you might want to start a business in the new year. It’s hard to get motivated by an abstraction though. Inspiration requires a high-definition visual of the compelling reality you wish to create, a mental movie so enticing that you can’t wait to get started. What kind of business do you want to start? Where do you plan to be a week into it? A month? Three months? How many users/customers/clients are you aiming for at each stage? How will you monetize it?

The delay of putting things off till New Year’s is often followed by another time gap: the entire 365 days you give yourself to achieve your goal. This is where Parkinson’s Law exerts its downward pull, and virtually guarantees that it will take you at least that long to reach the finish line, if you even show up for the race.

It’s no fun when your target lays beyond the horizon. Immediate action requires a bullseye within arrow’s reach. A better alternative to a New Year’s Resolution is a Now Resolution. Anything worth doing was probably worth doing a year ago, which means you’re already several thousand acres of rain forest behind. Or a few dozen pounds. Or a few thousand civilian deaths. Or a whole lot of whatever unit measures your success.

Instead of thinking of your goal as something that you’d like to achieve in the future, think of it as a chain reaction you invoke in the present, strung together by intention, initiated by living your life as though you’ve already achieved it, and are now just letting all the pieces fall into place. Of course, there’ll no doubt be a lot of hard work to “letting” those pieces fall into place, but the present moment becomes an almost gravitational force for your desires when you configure your Now to look and feel as much like your intended future as possible.

Holiday Productivity

Contrary to what Santa Claus might tell you, the holidays are a great time for introspection, exploration, and test driving various pursuits to see which ones make you come alive. It’s a time of the year that brings us back to our highest values: family, friends, food, alcohol, and–for those of you who take time off–an uninterrupted chunk of quality time to do whatever you want.

This temporarily stress-free lifestyle provides an ideal litmus test for our passions. One of the best ways to figure out what you love to do is to consider what you spend your holidays doing. If you’re not obsessed with something enough that you need be almost physically pulled away from it to eat Christmas dinner, you haven’t yet found your life purpose. “I wouldn’t even think of working on that over the holidays!” is the stuff of which 9-to-5 jobs are made.

If you can’t yet think of an activity that consumes you that deeply, that’s okay. What better time than now to spoil yourself on some new toys to see what really lights you up? This kind of treasure hunting doesn’t have to cost a lot of money, though the rewards just might break the bank.

For example, two years ago, when I was visiting my parents for Christmas, I had some time off to relax, and some attention to expense. I decided that poker looked interesting. I would have never imagined myself taking an interest in gambling, but my Weird Idea Radar knew I was onto something. I quickly became fascinated with the idea of waging a war against chance, and with how I could learn my way into positive expectation.

I gave myself a Christmas present of a poker book for about $30 and it was love at first sight. I immediately started playing online and continued learning and improving from there. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that this diversion, which captivated me during the holidays, also ended up consuming every minute of my waking life–when I wasn’t working on Ubuntu’s bug tracker–for the next year. Two years later, poker remains a casual interest of mine, though it has taken a back seat to other priorities.

Of course, you don’t have to celebrate Christmas to find your true passions. These ideas apply to any time of the year where you’ve got some time off to kick back and relax, whether it’s a holiday tradition or just some random work vacation. Times like these can provide the deepest insights into what you really enjoy doing. If you don’t already have activities that absorb you when you don’t have to worry about work the next morning, this can also be a great opportunity to let your curiosity run wild and see where it takes you.