Human intelligence: How to use AI to keep your new year’s resolutions

The new year often arrives with its usual blast of determination. Eat better, move more, and get on top of life. By week two, Christmas biscuits are still being polished off, your running kit is buried in a drawer, and your early alarm has been snoozed into oblivion.

This is the point where our resolutions usually slide. Not because we’re lazy, but because our good intentions rarely survive contact with our real, daily lives.

That’s why using AI as an accountability partner can be surprisingly helpful. Not in a smashing your goals way. More like an endlessly patient coach who taps you on the shoulder and checks how it’s actually going.

Breaking goals into smaller chunks is one of the most reliable ways to stay motivated. But first, you need to know what you’re actually aiming for, and whether it’s realistic.

Try asking your chatbot: “I want to get fitter this year, but I’ve already lost momentum. Ask me some questions to help me work out what this looks like, and what’s realistic for me.”

Tools like ChatGPT or Gemini will ask how much time you truly have, what got in the way last time, and what progress means to you. By the end, fuzzy wishes tend to turn into something workable. It could even be strength training for 10 minutes with bags of flour while your children get ready for school.

The same applies to learning something new. I’m attempting Spanish this year (again). I told Gemini I had 15 minutes a day, maximum, and it set me a daily reminder complete with role plays, flashcards and quizzes. Whether I’ll still be using it by March is another matter, but it’s a better start than the Duolingo streak I ditched a few years ago.

I used to make “vision boards” to manifest what I wanted in life. Magazine clippings, glue sticks, and a heady dose of new year optimism. They never worked. But AI’s image capabilities have brought this process back in a form that’s easy to slot into everyday life.

Gemini’s ridiculously named Nano Banana image creator works best here. The trick isn’t asking for a picture of your goals, but refining what will motivate you first. Try: “I want to create a vision board image for this year. I’m going to talk about what gives me energy, my goals, and how I want to feel by December.” Get creative. Even ask for your word or motto of the year.

The image came back full of early morning light and open notebooks, with “ease” as my word of the year. I was hoping for something more impressive, but it’s probably right. It’s now my laptop screensaver. You could do this with your family too. Ask them what they want their year to feel like, and you might learn something. My friend’s daughter got rainbows, “being brave” and gold stars.

There are lots of books on building habits, including BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits, James Clear’s Atomic Habits. Sensible advice that feels doable at the time. Then life happens. This is where AI becomes genuinely useful. It can take those frameworks and apply them to your actual, messy evenings, rather than an idealised version of you.

Prompt to try: “Act as a habit coach using the Atomic Habits approach. I want to run twice a week but keep failing. How can I work out what’s going wrong?”

It’ll walk you through the four habit laws and ask practical things like where your trainers live, and what you already do without thinking. I now leave my trainers by the coffee machine, so I see them before my brain wakes up enough to negotiate.

The useful thing is not that AI has better advice than a book. It’s that it can remind you of the stuff you read years ago and have since forgotten, without you having to dig out the book or find that post-it note you wrote it down on three Januarys ago.

I took my goal-setting further and uploaded last year’s journal into Google’s NotebookLM. The AI-generated podcast it produced with two unnervingly upbeat hosts dissecting my inner life was frankly quite annoying. But it spotted things I’d missed, such as the goals I set but never started, and the ones I actually achieved without noticing.

Of course, none of this replaces knowing yourself. AI won’t make you an early morning person if you fundamentally aren’t one. But I'm clearer than I've ever been on how to make the habit stick. The trainers are still by the coffee machine, and I’ve got a chirpy coach on standby for when it all goes wrong. I'll take that.

Harriet Meyer has spent more than 20 years writing about personal finance before becoming somewhat obsessed with artificial intelligence

Illustration by Charlotte Durance