Groundhog Day Resolutions Postmortem Day!

I have a productivity system called Groundhog Day Resolutions (aka GHDR) which is, at its heart, just a way to remember when to review my yearly goals. There are only two parts:

• Start my yearly resolution commitment on February 2nd, Groundhog Day
• Write a report on goal progress on every "double month/day" (e.g. March 3rd 3/3, April 4th 4/4)

The actual resolutions you make and how you track them is up to you. There is no official system. The best thing about it is that you don't have to remember, "it's it the second Monday every month? Is today second Monday?" Instead you just see the double-date pattern and exclaim, "Oh ho! It's review day! What the heck were my goals???" and then you go look them up and maybe plan better for next time. With practice, you learn to reflect on your goals periodically, which is the big win as far as I'm concerned.

The second best thing about it, after you've remembered it's a Review Day, that other people might be also posting their reviews.

I'm declaring January 13 as Postmortem Day and have added this as an official review day to the Groundhog Day Resolutions Definition Page. This post kicks off my postmortem review.

When I first posted about Groundhog Day Resolutions back in 2007You can find the original 2007 post on my old website at davidseah.com/2007/02/groundhog-day-resolutions/. All archived GHDR years prior to 2022 are located in the old lab notebook, and recent years are on this website under the ghdr category. I brazenly thought I could just apply a bit of willpower and knock down big goals without too much effort. Yet here I am in 2026, about to take another run at those big goals. I probably picked goals that were too big for me. Every year, though, I learn something about myself and am a little smarter--I hope--as I try again. I didn't always see this as a "win", but after the first dozen years I started to see the big patterns in my frustration repeat, and started to come up with better mitigations based on my personal quirks and traits which I meticulously documented in my report notes.

This past year's Groundhog Day Resolutions, I am happy to say, seems to have been the most successful one yet. Instead of setting goals as I had in the past, I instead rephrased it as an experiment:

The driving factor behind this is the notion that my "productivity system" is powered by a alignment with key personal values, not metrics or process. I start with the key personal values, and then metrics and process are shaped to meet their needs. This is, I believe, not a common way to approach productivity, graphic design, or technologyArguably any human-centered design field like Industrial Design or User Experience is also focused on people, but in my case I am thinking of their emotional experience as the primary problem space that enables efficiency, whereas the more technical approach to human-centered design is to model people as systems. What I'm interested in is maybe more like applying the psychology of advertising benevolently to productivity to effect positive change rather than to nab a sale..

Anyway, I have affirmed that the values-first approach to productivity seems to work for me. I'll have more to talk about in Friday's post.

On a side note, I'll be running the GHDR Mastermind Group again this year in my Discord. Last year we had 5 or so folks who stuck it through to the end, so we'll be doing a postmortem on what worked (and didn't) in the coming days. There is no mandated system that group members have to follow; you can bring your own!

That said, we might be workshopping different starter systems for people to try. I'd like this system to be extremely permissive yet offer some structure. In the case of Groundhog Day Resolutions, it's just the two things:

1. Write down your goals or objectives on February 2nd in a place you can revisit.
2. Every double-day (March 3, April 4, etc) write down how you did until Decemmber 12.

However, goal writing and reflective writing is a skill where guiding materials can prompt different approaches to goal setting and tracking. It would be nice to have a collection of them. Even more important, in my eyes, is to provide assurance that it's expected that pursuing our goals will not be perfect, nor is GHDR a oppressive commitment to excel or perform at the highest level. GHDR is more like a daily walk throughout the seasons of your productive year. When it's raining, maybe you decide to do something else. Just make a note and hit it again later.