You still sticking with that New Year’s resolution?

It’s been six weeks since the turn of the year, and chances are that you’ve already given up on your New Year’s resolutions by now. If not, well, please accept my heartfelt congratulations on your tenacity. But if you have (or are about to), don’t worry too much – you’re not alone. About eight in 10 people give up on their NY resolutions by February, and only the most strong-willed stick with them beyond the first quarter of the year. That may suggest that resolutions are meant to be broken and life goes on nevertheless. But let’s try and see if we can revisit that laundry list of resolutions and zero in the ones that we shouldn’t have let go.

It’s a simple enough process — step one, locate that Word doc or the piece of paper on which you jotted them down. Step two, narrow the list down to three or perhaps five of the most pressing resolutions you may have initially listed in all your earnestness. Strike out the rest. Done? Now give a thorough, hard re-look at the ones that still remain and add a little bit of perspective to them. Like if you said ‘exercise more frequently’ in your original list, try and put down a frequency to it — like thrice or four times a week, for at least 30 minutes.

What this does is that it gives you smaller, achievable goals for the week rather than the herculean yearly target. It, therefore, becomes easier for you to decide what works better for you: a Sunday-Wednesday rhythm or a Thursday to Sunday rhythm. Or even alternate days. It remains flexible, which means that if you miss a day, it’s still not the end of the world. You can still pick it up on a different day this week — or even another week. Don’t go for that perfect score — if the objective is to lose weight or stay fit, then a missed day will do much less harm than giving up after trying for perfection. After all, there still are another 46 weeks to go in the year.