Written by: Brandon Trissler
Tom here. I’m handing this week’s post over to one of my oldest friends, Brandon Trissler—a content marketer who’s been helping me edit and prep AATM posts since we launched.
Brandon, unlike me, is a self-professed procrastinator, so I asked him to try out some approaches to reality checks and resolutions that I wrote about previously. We can see if these frameworks might, or might not, help with procrastinaging.
Meet the new me, same as the old me?
I’ve never put much stock in New Year’s resolutions, primarily because I am in the group of 9 out of 10 who fail to keep them. Over the years, I convinced myself that resolutions were a waste of time and an arbitrary invention like Valentine’s Day or nu metal.
Tom’s take on resolutions made me reconsider my humbug attitude. His approach to do a reality check and then take a step-by-step process to achieving resolutions made me think this year could be different.
Would I have a road to Damascus moment and be reborn with my resolutions? Or would old habits die harder than John McClane?
Goodbye optimism of Past Me, Hello reality of Future Me
The reality check step was the part I’d always skipped. Rather than telling myself to “get healthier” or “write more,” I had to realistically assess where I was in terms of physical function, work stress, and work-life balance.
The other change was in how I formed the resolutions themselves. Instead of the traditional aspirational approach that nearly always fails because we’re overly optimistic about what we could do, I visualized my future self at the end of 2026, focusing on the how over the what:
-
Step 1: Get in the head of future you. I visualized a retrospective narrative of how I achieved my goals, which illustrated the steps to get there. Basically, I would look ahead to write the story of my success (easy when you’re already a writer, right?).
-
Step 2: Extract process from the story. Along the lines I mentioned, you write a resolution that includes behavior, a system, or decision. Instead of “I need to do more retirement planning,” it’s “I am going to use retirement calculators to assess different retirement scenarios and talk with a financial planner about those different options.”
-
Step 3: Succeed through quarterly check-ins instead of failing to keep daily promises. Which is what I’m doing now!
-
Step 4: Visualize your freedom from your resolution. This is a big but important change, because you gain mental bandwidth back once you accomplish your goal.
The resolution scorecard: One A-, one C-, one D+
With all this self-assessment and future visualization in place, here are the resolutions I set and how I graded myself:
Resolution 1: Planning for my daughter’s transition to college this fall (A-)
Future visualization and extracting process from the story worked well for this very important resolution. I could start with visualizing my daughter being at campus and work backward to determine the steps: deadlines, aid packages, researching outcomes and support services, and all those important conversations about what she wants out of college.
Campus tours were a big part of Resolution 1. This was Seton Hall Unversity.
As far as paying for college, we are also navigating two options: taking a full-tuition aid package at one school vs. taking a lesser financial aid package at my daughter’s top choice. Again, we are using future visualization to help: What does it look like to have loans vs no loans? Do we see a brighter future and more ROI from the top choice? We have until May 1 to make a final decision, but for the first time, a resolution felt more like a planning process instead of a wishful thinking exercise.
Resolution 2: Make a real plan for pre-retirement (C-)
Having the goal of successfully choosing and paying for college nearly complete, I visualized having freedom from a resolution: what would my wife and I do after our daughter leaves? That visualization made me realize that we have not taken the right steps toward planning for our next ten years or so before we want to retire.
I have become more aware of this since I started working on AATM posts with Tom. My wife and I have been good about contributing to our 401ks and are pretty sure we’ll be fine in retirement. That, however, is more of the makings of a plan than a plan.
More importantly, it’s the period between now and retirement that seem more murky financially. Fifteen years into owning a home that’s nearly 100 years old, a rash of needed repairs revealed the softness of our monthly cash flow. That’s okay, we can always sell the house at a tidy profit and buy a condo in the city like the hipsters we are, we told ourselves. Except after talking with realtors about what we’d need to do to get the condo we wanted, we realized that would not happen if we had to buy on contingency.
I’ll give myself a C- because we learned what else we need to learn. But I realized I have to get more analytical and less aspirational in planning our financial future…and consider getting some professional advice to secure the retirement we want and still be able to help our daughter post-graduation.
Resolution 3: Improve my physical function and reduce my stressors (D+)
This is the one where I fell down completely. It’s April and I have not touched my Peloton. I spend 12+ hours a day in my office chair, which is terrible for my functional health. And I’m still back at my desk after dinner most worknights.
Why not an F? Because the GLP-1 medication I started a year ago has helped me lose five more pounds this year – 20 overall – and my blood pressure has dropped to near-normal. Tracking both my weight and BP in an app has helped me make sure those numbers stay manageable.
But just like needing to plan my financial future in the next ten years, I need to plan my physical one as well. What good will it do me to strengthen my financial position only to have poor physical health from a sedentary lifestyle? Or worse — that hypertension lives up to its nickname, “The Silent Killer.”
So I am making changes to limit those late-night work sessions to no more than two nights per week and schedule three days of workouts that are as locked in as a doctor’s appointment.
The big lesson: Check-in and move on
As I put this together, I realized how much of my new approach to resolutions still resembled my old approach (again, Procrastinator here). Previously, I would have said humbug and ditched the resolutions until next New Year’s. However, that’s what I like about this quarterly check-in approach. I haven’t failed, I’ve assessed, and now I can recalibrate. I can still shape my 2026 story that I’ll be happy to reflect on by New Year’s Day.