You're listening to Life Kit from NPR.

Hey everybody, it's Mariel.

It's a classic story.

We set these big resolutions on New Year's Eve and then drop them by mid-January.

And this happens throughout the year, too.

We have goals, but life and our routines and habits get in the way.

One thing that can help is the buddy system.

Francisco Ramirez, who lives in New York, kind of intuitively knew he needed this.

He has this stuffed animal rabbit that he keeps on his desk.

This is memo, memo the rabbit.

Actually, he calls it Memo the High Five Rabbit,

because for a while, every time he finished a task,

I would give Memo a high five, and we'd celebrate.

I had other versions of this with a paper squirrel,

I did all sorts of fun, sort of motivating tools.

But an inanimate object could only provide so much support.

So I remember specifically searching high and low for something that would connect me to

somebody who wasn't a stuffed animal or a paper squirrel.

Francisco started searching for real-life human accountability buddies.

An accountability buddy is someone who you partner with to work on goals

together. This can look a lot of different ways. You can know the person before or not. You can be

working towards the same goals or different ones. But what we've heard over and over again is the

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