Here is an important message from Nonsense At Work. The name of the month is July and the number of the month is seven.

Do you know what that means?

From here it’s downhill all the way to December 31^st. And do you know what happens on December 31^st? You will once again be making the same resolutions that did not stick this year.

But wait! You still have five months and a bit. So try this trick to make them stick.

Imagine it is already December of this year and you are looking back on a successful year. Describe what that success looks like to you. How do you know it was a successful year? What happened? What did you do? And so on.

Look back in time to July, from December, and note what you did, what you had to do, to create that success. What steps do you think you had to take (did take, in your mind) to create that success? Write them down.

Why should you do this? When we look to the future, we tend to see obstacles on our path. But when you ‘stand’ in the future and look back in time, you tend to see the path to that future. (This is the basic idea of “idealized design” as presented by Russell Ackoff after work done at Bell Labs in the 1950s.)

Come back to the present, to July, and start doing those very things today.

That’s how you create sticky success on the downhill to December. And how you turn resolutions into done-just-in-time.

Welcome to my side of the nonsense divide.