Using behavioral science to make habits and resolutions actually stick

Executive overview

Most New Year's resolutions fail because motivation from fresh starts is temporary — it fades by February. Sustained change requires diagnosing the right obstacles and applying the right tools.

Behavioral scientist Katy Milkman outlines a toolkit drawn from decades of research: pre-mortems to anticipate failure, temptation bundling to make hard things enjoyable, defaults and nudges to reduce friction, and social conformity as an accelerant.

Fresh starts spark change; systems sustain it.

Why fresh starts work — and where they fall short

• Fresh starts (New Year's, Mondays, birthdays) create a sense of a clean slate, separating us from our past failures.
• They reliably boost motivation — but only temporarily.
• Best used for one-and-done actions: enrolling in a 401k, scheduling a cancer screening.
• For habits requiring sustained effort, motivation alone collapses by February.
• Fresh starts recur often — every Monday is one — so you can manufacture them mid-year.

The five obstacles to lasting change

• Impulsivity: present-moment rewards crowd out long-term benefits.
• Procrastination: a close cousin of impulsivity, but with distinct solutions.
• Laziness: humans, like good algorithms, seek the path of least resistance — habits form to avoid thinking.
• Low confidence: if you don't believe you can do something, you won't invest the effort.
• Conformity: your social circle shapes what you believe is possible, for better or worse.

Pre-mortem: diagnosing your obstacles before you fail

• A pre-mortem asks: if I fail, what will have caused it?
• Sounds pessimistic — it's actually protective.
• Identifying your specific obstacle lets you pick the right tool.
• Generic plans ("I'll exercise more") fail; specific if-then plans work ("Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays at 5pm, 30 minutes on the elliptical").

Temptation bundling: making hard things enjoyable

• Pair a chore you dread with a temptation you'd feel guilty about enjoying alone.
• Only allow access to the temptation during the chore.
• Milkman only listened to addictive audiobooks at the gym — she started looking forward to going.
• Flips the equation: instead of dreading the task, you anticipate it.
• Aligns with the science: if pursuing a goal feels miserable, you'll quit. Make it enjoyable.

Defaults and nudges: reducing friction

• A nudge changes behavior without changing incentives or information.
• A default is what happens if you do nothing — design defaults to favor good outcomes.
• Home example: stock the pantry with carrots and hummus, not Doritos. The lazy path becomes the healthy path.
• Workplace example: block deep work time on calendars by default; people can opt out.
• Prompting someone to form a specific plan is itself a nudge.

Goal gradient effect: break big goals into small ones

• We're more motivated as we get close to completing a goal.
• A 200-hour annual volunteer target feels distant for months; a 4-hour weekly target feels achievable immediately.
• Research with Crisis Text Line: reframing the goal as "4 hours a week" produced an ~8% productivity increase.
• For leaders: translate annual targets into weekly or daily concrete milestones.

Using conformity to drive organizational change

• People are strongly influenced by what peers are doing.
• If 60% have already adopted a change, telling the remaining 40% that "the majority of your peers are doing this" accelerates adoption.
• Nobody wants to feel left out or behind.
• Robert Cialdini's Influence is the canonical reference on evidence-based persuasion.

Driving change from the middle of an organization

• People at the top are often incentivized toward incremental growth, not transformation.
• Reduce friction to near zero: don't just propose the change — bring the memo, the list, the execution plan.
• Make it one step for the decision-maker: "just sign here, I'll handle the rest."
• Ease of execution is often the real blocker, not willingness in principle.

Hiring in sets to increase diversity

• When hiring one at a time, diversity is invisible — you can't assess the diversity of an individual.
• When hiring in sets (e.g., five at once), evaluators naturally think about group composition.
• Batching hires is a simple structural nudge toward more diverse outcomes.

Setbacks are normal — plan for them

• People consistently underestimate how hard change will be.
• Planning fallacy: we imagine the successful path, not the potholes.
• Knowing that setbacks are the norm reduces discouragement when they happen.
• Pairing this with a growth mindset and fresh-start psychology allows recovery and restart.