New Year's Day is just ahead and we'll ready off on the path to hell; you know, the main one paved with higher intentions.

We'll set goals and honestly think that we'll lose weight, visit the gym, increase our sales, customize the job, spend more time with the children or anything else.

No we won't. We'll keep pigging out, avoiding Qing Zi Shou exercise, posting average sales numbers, tolerating our crummy jobs, and opting to operate late.

How do you know? Because studies show so good intentions take into account only 20% to 30% of variance in behavior. One recent study even demonstrated that the more positive we are about our good intentions, the more severe results we'll get.

So, the very best predictor of what you'll do in 2015 isn't what you say you'll do on January 1.

It's what you actually did in 2014.

But's it isn't hopeless

I'd be considered a hardened pessimist otherwise to begin with - there is a quick fix that may bridge the space between goal intentions and goal accomplishment.

It's what behavioral psychologists call "implementation intentions." Ugly phrase, I understand. But it could be the difference between achieving your goals in 2015 and failing miserably.

Tons of research exists on "implementation intentions." In one landmark study, researchers pooled subjects who meant to start exercising and assigned these to three groups. The Control Group got no input from the researchers. The Experiment Group 1 received educational materials correlating exercise and good cardio-vascular health. And the Experiment Group 2 stated its "implementation intentions"

Ninety-one percent from the participants in Experiment Group 2 - those who wrote down their "implementation intentions" - exercised. Only 29% from the control group and 39% of those that browse the health literature exercised.

The outcomes seem implausible. How could writing down what you plan to do make this type of big difference?

It's no surprise to Peter M. Gollwitzer, a psychologist at New York University who's been studying goal achievement since about 1980. His research has revealed the curious power implementation intentions, which are anchored by "if-then" statements like the one that's implied in the make up the Experiment 2 participants filled out - "If Tuesday at 8 a.m. arrives, i quickly will go to a health club." An implementation intention doesn't only get specific concerning the goal. It gets specific about where and when you're going to do stuff that will help you do it.

Gollwitzer writes inside a just-published article that "goal intentions" - even very specific ones such as "I'm going to reach X" - usually don't succeed. But those "if-then" statements do succeed simply because they "link critical situational cues with instrumental goal-directed responses." Quite simply, Gollwitzer writes, "If situation Y is encountered, then I will work the goal-directed response Z."

I called Gollwitzer at NYU and asked him why our brains process if-then statements so differently from mere goal intentions. "When you have a goal intention - 'I want to achieve an outcome' - the 'I' is in the middle from it," he explained. "It's a top-down regulating action. It's me who regulates where I want to go. The if-then plan delegates the control for an external stimulus. It links the situation to the response, so it's the stimulus, not you, that controls the action. It's a switch from top-down to bottom-up."

This is the magic of recording if-then statements - they automate the response. They effectively trick our minds. You do that which you said you had been going to do unconsciously, just like a routine.

The irony is that to obtain this unconscious action to take place, you need to go ahead and take very conscious step of determining the specific situations where you want to trigger an answer, then writing down your plan. "The forming of the plan is conscious," Gollwitzer explains. "The execution is unconscious."

I put implementation intentions towards the test recently. I wrote recorded on a Sunday night that Monday, Wednesday and Friday from the coming week I'd visit the gym or more my Twenty minutes on the treadmill to 30 minutes. On Monday I achieved transpire. On Wednesday I woke up tired and really didn't seem like exercising. However i visited the gym. After Fifteen minutes around the treadmill I began telling myself I wasn't will make it.

But I'd anticipated this and back on Sunday night I deployed a related implementation intentions trick. I composed a second note to myself: "If I get enough where I want to quit, i quickly will focus intently on my audiobook and tune out the pain and fatigue I'm feeling."

I had been able to perform that. At the 15-minute mark, I flipped a switch and immersed myself in Margaret Atwood's novel Oryx and Crake, eyes closed. I had an IV to narrator Campbell Scott, hearing not just the story but additionally his phrasing, the timbre of his voice. When I finally opened my eyes the timer on the treadmill showed Ten minutes had passed. I'd busted with the barrier. The last 5 minutes were easy. On Friday I hit transpire again.

Okay, what's that prove? It had been only one week. But I can attest that even though I didn't want to go on Wednesday, Irrrve never came near to caving. I'd written it down. I'd committed. My brain complied. And the audiobook trick worked surprisingly well when I encountered a hurdle.

Gollwitzer cites numerous surprising studies proving that implementation intentions work. In a single, students were inspired to write an optional paper over Christmas break. Of those who wrote down when and where they'd write the paper, two-thirds of them made it happen. Of those who didn't create implementation intentions, none completed the task.

Research has indicated that implementation intentions helped people not just get started but keep on track when trying to recycle, vote, lose weight, conduct medical self-evaluations, take daily medication and ride public transit.

Gollwitzer says implementation intentions have the potential to help us manage people in work too. Most managers depend on the well-known S.M.A.R.T. model - creating goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound. That model is better than only, observes Gollwitzer, "the distance between setting goals and goal attainment is often long."

To bridge that gap, Gollwitzer shows that Slim Forte Doubule Power managers can get their associates to draft if-then statements that map desired actions to trigger events. And then draft a second set of if-then statements describing what they'll do once they encounter inevitable obstacles.

To those New Year's resolutions. In the next month we'll do the easy work of goal setting techniques for 2015. Just like we always have. But maybe this time we'll trick our brains with if-then statements. For many crazy reason the grey matter between our ears responds to those statements automatically, without conscious intent. And - surprise - we do what we said i was likely to do.