“I think in terms of the day’s resolutions, not the year’s.”   Henry Moore

Here it is, the middle of January, and already you see them everywhere.

They blanket the trails of Elk Meadow like confetti in Times Square. They rise in heaps and piles beneath bar stools all over town. Busy confectioneries have all but disappeared behind deep drifts of them. They are the desiccating carcasses of that most ephemeral species of human endeavor, the New Year’s resolution, and the best that can be said of this seasonal slaughter is that it’s entirely predictable.

About 45 percent of Americans make New Year’s resolutions on a regular basis. About 25 percent of those confident pledges won’t live to see Valentine’s Day, and another 30 percent will perish from neglect by the Fourth of July. According to several persistent pollsters, in fact, just 8 percent of all New Year’s resolutions survive a full calendar year, a revealing statistic suggesting that the essential element missing from most resolutions is actual resolve.

Orbit after orbit, Americans’ top three New Year’s resolutions in order of popularity are 1.) Lose Weight, 2.) Get Fit, and 3.) Live Life to the Fullest, the second runner-up having the advantage of being subject to easy re-interpretation on the fly. Other perennial favorites include Get Organized, Spend Less, Drink Less, Travel More, Get a New Job, Spend More Time with Family and Fall in Love.

Those are all excellent aspirations deserving of best effort. So why don’t 92 percent of them get it? As always, a contemplative coterie of academics has pondered that very question and identified a few of the fundamental flaws that each year keep something like 150 million Americans from meeting their better selves. Behold now their accumulated wisdom and resolution-ary strategies for responsible personal improvement.

Nanny No-No

Most people choose for their New Year’s Resolutions things they feel they “should” do, rather than things they actually want to do. Sigh. If your heart’s not really in it you’re halfway to hopeless right out of the gate, which is why experts recommend confining yourself to goals already endowed with a healthy supply of personal motivation. There’s a world of difference between pinching pennies because your financial advisor told you to and being careful about spending because you’re tired of eating process cheese sandwiches for breakfast, lunch and dinner, or because you’d look really, really cool on a brand-new motorcycle and/or the beach at Punta Mita.

Let’s Be Clear

“I’m gonna get in shape!” is a great idea and a lousy resolution. There are a hundred different ways to trim down and tone up, leaving you way too much discretion as to method, timetable and result. Will you jog? Swim? Hike? And how often? How far? How exactly will you know when you’re finally “in shape”? With so much wiggle room to work with, most people will quickly wiggle out of their commitment altogether, making specificity a key ingredient in the formulation of sensible resolutions. “I’ll jog two miles a day for three days a week until I’ve lost five pounds” boxes you in, which is exactly why it has a fighting chance to succeed. Psychologists advise choosing goals that lend themselves to rigorous scheduling and measurement, and then applying plenty of both.

Reality Check

Cold-turkey is for turkeys, and a critical failing of many resolutions is obvious over-reach. Instead of resolving to complete your first marathon by June, pledge first to get through the Fourth of July 5K Freedom Run without throwing up. Foreswear sweets across the board and you’ll just end up face-down in the quart of Rocky Road you’ve taken to stashing behind the frozen peas. A more reasonable approach might be to exchange diet cola for the full-strength kind, or maybe stop sugaring your Lucky Charms. You’re not the pillar of self-discipline you think you are, so don’t bite off more than you can chew.

One to a Customer

For those of you who’ve resolved not to be bored by long-winded scientific explanations in 2017, suffice it to say that neural scientists have determined that your odds of achieving a given New Year’s resolution decrease in direct proportion to the number of resolutions you make. The way the eggheads tell it, even a milk-run resolution requires will-power, and even a small expenditure of will-power consumes an enormous amount of mental energy. The term “cognitive fatigue” is just a six-bit way of saying that the more resolutions you’re burning brain-time on, the less will-power you can apply to any one of them and the more certain will be your abject defeat on all fronts. For best results, pick one and done.

Share the Load

Whether you’re swearing off carbohydrates or social media, self-improvement is a heavy burden to bear alone. Tell your family. Tell your friends. Tell your co-workers. Tell the kid who shovels your driveway. By making sure lots of people know about your brave resolution, you’ll not only ensure priceless moral and emotional support, but you’ll pretty much guarantee immediate contempt and ridicule when you try to weasel out of it. There’s nothing quite so motivating as the fear of public shame.

Mixed Messages

We are all of us frail creatures, and a little back-sliding is built into our DNA. That you missed a scheduled hour on the treadmill is no good reason to throw up your hands and sink back into your original program of overindulgence and sloth. If you’re bent on a positive change genuinely desired, don’t get sidetracked by the occasional lapse. On the other hand – and the experts are quite adamant on this point – there is no statistical rationale for attempting a failed resolution a second time. If you couldn’t read a book a week in 2016, there’s no good reason to think you’ll be able to do it in 2017. Accept defeat gracefully and move on to one of your countless other character deficiencies in desperate need of remediation.

“Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.”   Benjamin Franklin