Every time the new year rolls around my timeline is always full of ambitious people writing long lists of new year's resolutions. They type with full enthusiasm: going to the gym regularly, reading 50 books a year, learning a new language, getting a six figure salary job, and reducing screen time.

I read them and can only smile bitterly. Not because I am mean, but mathematically speaking, what they are doing is pure computational suicide.

Let us analyze this using Big O Notation. If you have one goal, the effort to complete it might just be O(1) or at worst O(n) if it requires linear time. But new year's resolutions? That is a different story bro.

New year's resolutions are mutually interdependent in nature. You want to go to the gym regularly (requires time and energy), at the same time you want to read 50 books (requires free time and focus), and you also want to push rank in your career (requires time, energy, and a healthy mental state). This is like you telling an old server to run 10 heavy docker containers simultaneously without adding any RAM.

What happens? Bottleneck.

The complexity of trying to handle all those resolutions at once is not just linear, but can be exponential O(2^n) or even factorial O(n!). Why? Because a variable of failure in one thing will affect another. You are tired from working overtime for your career, the next day you skip the gym. Because you skipped the gym, your mood is ruined. A ruined mood makes you too lazy to read a book. And it goes on like that until eventually you find yourself lying down scrolling social media while feeling like the biggest failure on earth.

People tend to forget that early-year resolutions are actually a form of motivational technical debt. You are taking on debt against your future self using energy that you might not even have. In January, you feel like you can pay off that debt because you are hyped. Once February hits, you realize the interest on the debt (aka the reality of life) has piled up.

So what is the solution then? Not make resolutions?

Not exactly. If you genuinely intend to upgrade yourself, do not use a greedy algorithm approach where you try to grab everything up front. Use a dynamic programming approach. Just focus on one small thing, for instance fixing your sleep schedule first. Once your sleep schedule is stable (it has become O(1) aka a habit), only then do you add a new function to your life.

Life is not a 24-hour hackathon where you have to deliver all features at once. Life is a long-term project. If you commit drastic changes all at one time, you will just end up getting severe merge conflicts in your brain. It is better to push small changes but consistently.

Anyway I am going to take a nap now. Brain server maintenance.