New Year's resolutions

NEW YORK — It’s that season again, when we resolve to accomplish a list of goals in the coming year. Not infrequently, these are the goals that we were resolved to accomplish during the preceding year.

If you were to ask Prince-ton psychologist Eldar Shafir or Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan for a better New Year’s strategy, they’d likely suggest that the best resolution you can make is to do fewer things in 2013. The researchers argue that when busy people get busier, it leads to ignored deadlines, a cluttered desk, and a vicious cycle of falling further and further behind. Amid the disorder, a lot of bad decisions get made, and the best means of escape from this cycle may be a moratorium on new obligations.

When you read the words "New Year's resolution," what is the very first thing that comes to your mind?

Most teenagers will plead guilty to having their first thought of a resolution being something simple along the lines of "losing weight" or "getting good grades."

It seems like no one really considers putting the effort or time into making a meaningful resolution, and my question for such teenagers is, "Why?" Why not take a quick five or 10 minutes to sit down and actually put some thought into a resolution that could possibly be helpful in the long run?

OGDEN -- When trying to improve your life, what's best, baby steps or giant leaps?

Rhonda Lauritzen, Ogden-Weber Tech vice president of student services and a popular motivational speaker at the school's Student Success Center, is a giant leap kind of woman.

"I heard about a great study five or six years ago where people who were unhealthy were told by their doctors they had to change their lifestyle or they would die," Lauritzen said. "Almost everybody was unable to stick to lifestyle changes, but one group succeeded, and it was the group that made the most dramatic changes."

Uh-oh, the new year has just begun and already you're finding it hard to keep those resolutions to junk the junk food, get off the couch or kick smoking. There's a biological reason a lot of our bad habits are so hard to break -- they get wired into our brains.

That's not an excuse to give up. Understanding how unhealthy behaviors become ingrained has scientists learning some tricks that may help good habits replace the bad.

The New Year's Resolution. It can come in many forms: scribbled down on the page of a notebook, published via a Facebook status update, frustratingly vented out to a friend in mid-December, or just a measly declaration that "Next year, I'll ... (fill in the blank)".

I started writing this story the day before its deadline.

As one of my many 2010 New Year's resolutions was to stop procrastinating once and for all, this is an example of one of many "Epic Fails" that teens came across this year regarding their New Year's resolutions.