How to keep a New Year's resolution

A year ago I mentioned I'd signed up for a study on keeping New Year's resolutions, and the main advice my control group got was to go public. The resolution I used in the study was writing a novel, so I actually achieved it, and telling many people I knew about it definitely helped me to get it done.

The results of the entire study have been published recently and it seems like my behaviour was typical for a woman - we keep resolutions better if we go public. Men, on the other hand, did better if they broke their resolution up into small (for example, weekly) goals. But the depressing overall result is that only 12% of the participants achieved their 2007 goal.

I've signed up for 2008 New Year's Resolution Experiment (you can too, if you're interested) using the goal of submitting a novel to a contest or an agent/publisher. Of course that entails a complete rewriting (possibly many times) of the novel draft I have, so it's no mean feat. And right now I'm going to sit down in the living room with a cold drink, a good CD and a note pad and try to write up my full list of 2008 resolutions or goals. I'll be back soon to tell you about the fiction writing ones.