Well i often here people saying that its generally a bad idea to set yourself too many goals or resolutions whatever you want to call them, but in my opinion setting yourself many goals can actually be advantageous.

The general consensus on why setting more than a few goals for yourself at time is bad tends to be that you get over worked, burned out etc and end up completely giving up after only a short period of time, now if we look at two common examples of resolutions people set lets say smoking and losing weight pretty common as I'm sure you will agree people will often set these goals at the same time often at the new year, which they are both pretty big lifestyle changes giving up something that your body is so used to, thus why a lot of people find it difficult to complete both goals they would be better off setting only one and the other later. Obviously everybody varies and people with greater will power may be able to manage this.

Now onto why I think its a good idea to set many goals all at once say for example something like my own personal list I have keeping fit, learning a language and saving money to name but a few which many of these I set around the same time after hitting a stage of wanting to improve myself, so far I've managed to stick with these although I have dropped some along the way i.e. a while ago i set myself a goal to learn powershell scripting not hugely difficult but my interest waned and without even realizing it became a failed goal. There's also been a few others I set around the time of my self improvement phase which I've lost site of but all in all I've kept going strong.

To say I set myself around 10 goals or so of which I've only dropped around 3-4 of those over the last 5-6 months and the others are still going strong, I think I've done pretty well now if I had only set 1-2 goals which might have taken say 2-3 months to do for a short term goal with the possibility of one of those being dropped I don't think I would get as much self improvement in the time than I would with multiple goals so potentialy wasted time.

Choosing your goals

How to choose your goals for the best retention this can be down to each persons willpower and motivation but a general idea is to keep them varied maybe have 1-2 that could be called major lifestyle change like not having a daily trip to Burger King order everything large and instead having a salad, then perhaps set the rest of your goals as mini ones i.e. get an extra half hours sleep a night and/or setting yourself long term self improvement goals like learning a language, saving for a holiday or improving your image the ones that don't take a huge change to your life just adding something extra.

So to cap it off, the next time your in a self improvement phase dont just choose one thing you want to change or add to your life try making yourself a list of ways you'd like to improve, change or to just expand your reality you'll be supprised with how much you can actually stick with.