It's Okay If You Didn't Achieve Your January Goals

January arrives with the excitement and ambition of New Year's resolutions. Many treat the turning of the year as a fresh start. Yet, most people give up on their goals within two to six weeks. If January didn't go as planned or start with the bang and progress you hoped for, don't fret — there's a case to be made for holding space and giving yourself permission to pause. Megan Reitz, author and Associate Fellow at Saïd Business School, Oxford University, and Adjunct Professor of Leadership and Dialogue at Hult International Business School, has studied the art of "spaciousness" and her latest research on the topic provides tips on how to pause and reflect on what this busyness is all about — and why society makes us feel lazy or inefficient for doing so. It's time to throw out societal norms around busyness to create space for the things that matter most and reprioritize what it means to work in 2025.

"There’s a deep irony in that many people start the year having resolutions around being more mindful and being less stressed and, in the process, manage to come up with a whole pile of more tasks in order to do that," says Reitz. Spaciousness flips that concept on its head. It’s not about making time to squeeze in extra work to do all the things in pursuit of certain goals; rather, it’s about shifting one's attention to see the world as more dynamic instead of simply as a series of things to do. "The spacious mode is a mode where we widen our attention. We look at the world as it is, flowing and moving. We see interdependencies and relationships. When we look at the world in that way, we make markedly different decisions."

Given how important having the capacity to pause and breathe is, how did performative busyness become so pervasive at work and in our personal lives? "I think there are a number of causes," says Reitz. "For example, the Protestant work ethic contains the idea that it is a sin to be lazy. You must be busy. There are societal pressures that many of us have encountered with the position of being busy and active as better than the appearance of not being busy. Then, in the workplace, you have leaders and managers who — when we look at them — are insanely busy. You can’t get into their calendars." That busyness signals to employees that to be successful, one must also be busy.

One piece of advice Reitz gives to create more space is to ask if you really need to be doing everything that's on your task list. Once something makes it onto the to-do list, it's rare that people stop and critically re-examine if they actually need to do it. Rather, people just mindlessly do. "There's a capacity in all of us to follow absurd practices without even noticing them," says Reitz.

Critically pressing pause is even harder to do in a corporate environment. "If you're not the one at the top, yet you are the one that says 'Can we all just stop here? Are we really supposed to be even doing this?' that's a politically charged thing to do. In many settings, it can be career limiting," says Reitz. Then, there's the issue of measurement, which makes shifting work habits to be more mindful difficult. "Many of us are measured acutely on our quarterly targets — if not weekly or even daily. So the way that we are measured keeps many of our habits in place."

But perhaps a more powerful reason drives why we’re hesitant to break out of these normative cycles. "One of my favorite quotes in the research is when someone said that if you open up space, you let doubt in — and who wants that?" Reitz is spot on; when you are forced to pause, you are also forced to think about the choices you’ve made, the consequences of those choices, and what needs to come next. It takes an immense amount of psychological safety to create the spacious moments that inspire deep reflection. "Many of us avoid those hard questions until we can’t do anything but encounter them. I was struck by the number of people who when asked about an experience of spaciousness, they mentioned the hospital. They referred to those moments where everything was taken away and they had to face and acknowledge the space."

The good news is, we don’t need a forced trip to the hospital to create spaciousness in our life. That’s because spaciousness isn’t a time management problem. It’s an attention problem. “You need to be able to sit with an intention that doesn’t offer an immediate solution or an immediate dopamine hit,” says Reitz. "To be able to sit with and not know…you understand the world differently and you'll come to very different insights. You have to have the courage to sit in the space — and we're not practicing that at work."

So, it's okay if you didn't achieve your January goals. Perhaps they weren't the right ones to begin with. But by being intentional with creating spaciousness and pressing pause, you'll achieve new clarity on what to prioritize for the rest of the year.

By Lindsay Kohler, Contributor