Sunday Runday
In this weekly column, Android Central Wearables Editor Michael Hicks talks about the world of wearables, apps, and fitness tech related to running and health, in his quest to get faster and more fit.
New Year’s resolutions have taken on a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure. Cold weather and returning to work sap your motivation. Then you hear excuses about Quitters Day — how “most people” abandon their resolutions by the second Friday in January — and settle back into your old routines because your resolutions were always doomed to fail. Convenient!
Apple referenced Quitters Day in its latest commercial, promising that its Apple Watch will give you “a little extra motivation” to “quit quitting.” It’s a nice idea, but as someone who’s tested most of the best fitness smartwatches, none of them can fundamentally change how you act by buzzing your wrist.
Watch alerts like hourly move reminders or having to log meals in your health app quickly become a source of guilt and annoyance because you feel like you don’t have the bandwidth or energy for them. It’s far too easy to turn these features off or stop using them until the guilt of abandoning your 2025 goals ebbs away.
Smartwatches are only built to reinforce habits and hobbies that you already enjoy, not magically make you love exercise or counting calories.
Despite all that, I believe in using tech and New Year’s resolutions to motivate myself. They work for me! I lost 30 pounds last year, ran more miles, hiked more steps than in 2023, and finished more personal projects — all with a Google Doc of resolutions and a smartwatch to motivate me. Believe it or not, I had fun following my resolutions.
Keeping in mind that I don’t know what your New Year’s resolutions for 2025 might be, let me help you “quit quitting” by running through a resolutions template that I think anyone can easily follow and that you can start any time or month, not just January.
Set monthly goals with moving goalposts
I’m no psychologist, but I think it’s pretty obvious that people with the weight and pressure of a year‘s expectations will quit when they can’t keep up with ambitious goals. If you want to walk 10,000 steps a day to lose weight and then fail to do so a few days in a row, you won’t bother restarting because you’ve already failed!
Now look at my personal walking and steps resolutions for 2025, above and below. Each month has a main gold-medal target — I love the Olympics — with bronze and silver offramps for months where I fall short and a level above gold in case I’m feeling especially motivated that month.
Why organize my goals this way? Simple: Whether your goal is related to steps, calories, or whatever, you’re going to have sick days, tough weeks at work, or even whole months where life’s roadbumps derail or distract you. So, you need to plan for failure if you want to succeed.
Even if I’m off my target pace for a given month, I can still hit my lesser targets, so I have a reason to persist. If I have a bad month, I still have 11 other months to shoot for gold; why quit?
If you’re trying to read more books or cook new recipes, it’s less daunting to aim for two a month than 20 that year. Maybe you skip a few months or only hit your backup silver goal with one book/recipe that month. But it doesn’t matter: you’re still outpacing last year when you gave up entirely.
The same goes for vaguer goals like making an effort to see friends more often or trying to drink or vape less often. Use an artificial monthly goal (only drink X times in January, plan a board game night for February) until it feels more natural without handrails, and don’t give up entirely just because you chickened out the first month.
Eventually, these monthly goals will build a foundation of habits, so you do these things without needing to track them.
Treat your resolutions like a living document
One reason to make your resolutions monthly instead of annual is that you can change your targets if you realize you made them too easy or difficult but still want to keep at it. Plus, you can add new goals at any time.
It’s hard to think about a goal like “swim more at the local pool” or “go hiking more” when it’s snowing and the trails are too muddy to climb. Some ideas don’t apply — or won’t come to you — until months from now.
My advice is to make more short-term resolutions, like an aspirational to-do list. If you want to try homebrewing beer or joining a local sports league, add it to your resolutions doc with a generous timeframe for when to start or sign up so it doesn’t fade out of your mind like other past fancies.
Adding new resolutions that you can quickly achieve throughout the year — and then moving on to something new — is the best way to keep things fresh. Otherwise, you’ll get bored tracking the same stats and goals month after month.
Make your resolutions fun
People don’t like to think about difficult things, and most resolutions are difficult because they require changing how you lived your life in the past months or years.
I’m the kind of weirdo who loves running, so aiming to run more miles or beat my fastest half-marathon PR in 2025 is aspirational rather than painful to consider. You should associate your goals with positivity, not a chore or burden, or it’s much harder to stick with it.
If you’re invested in difficult resolutions like budgeting or cutting calories, make your overall New Year’s resolutions more positive by throwing some fun gimmies onto your list, with no monthly timeline or difficulty curve.
Some of my resolutions are “beat 20 new video games in 2025” and “finish 12 new seasons of TV shows.” It’s no effort for me to finish these “resolutions,” and I probably would have done so anyway! But that’s the point.
My resolutions Google Doc is full of movies, shows, games, and books that I’ve been looking forward to. Checking them off my list lets me feel like taking care of my mental health is an accomplishment, and it feels more satisfying than sitting around watching YouTube or TikTok.
Plus, while I’m deciding which fun thing to do that night, I also scroll through my harder fitness or home improvement goals. Bribing myself with a fun resolution first makes it easier to plan out a difficult workout or project the following day.
Use tech that reinforces your goals
I wrote late last year about using fitness tech to shed Thanksgiving pounds, and while that holiday is long past, my advice still applies. Hourly stand reminders, walking more steps, using calorie apps like MyFitnessPal, and other tech tools are accessible ways to get healthier.
In my case, I use my Garmin watch to guide my runs and then check my monthly stats like mileage, steps, and race times in the app to transfer over to my resolutions doc. It doesn’t have to be Garmin; if your smartwatch of choice doesn’t organize stats monthly, export to Strava or another fitness app that does because it’s too easy to lose track if you log every activity manually.
Some fitness apps (like Garmin and Strava) have monthly challenges, but I think those are cherry-on-top rewards for working hard, not real motivators. If you start slacking off and stop closing your daily rings or see your VO2 Max fall, it’s too easy to refuse to open the app because you know you won’t like seeing your results.
A Google Doc or another note app can always remain open more easily, and you can highlight the stats you care about instead of getting overwhelmed with irrelevant data.