The New Year brings an opportunity for reflection and forward-thinking on actionable goals.
While December is quickly winding down, ending the year strong as a business owner can give you a stronger foothold to prepare for the next one.
Take time to acknowledge your successes
It’s difficult to make any measurable progress if you haven’t first taken a good look at where you’ve been and what you’ve accomplished so far. Taking a pulse on what you’ve achieved this past year can give you greater refinement for the goals you set in the future.
Take as much time as possible to list down all of the accomplishments, areas of progress, results or positive events that took place during the past calendar year. Think about your successes. Include all areas of your life from business, career and personal.
We often underestimate our progress throughout the year and focus more so on our losses. We think about what we didn’t accomplish or achieve for the year instead of what we did. As mass-loved positivity speaker, Tony Robbins says: where focus goes, energy flows.
Giving ourselves a little bit of encouragement and acknowledgement is a great way to close out the year.
Tie up loose ends
Little life annoyances like remembering that we meant to put our office files away or organize our desk drawer can take up mental bandwidth and make us feel unorganized.
Every time we look at it, we remember our intention and can experience a pang of failure or shame.
When our work and personal life are awash with things we’ve been putting off, we’re actively creating a sense of anxiety and disorganization. When we have small tasks that we ignore due to their general irrelevancy, their impact can have a consolidating effect on our mental bandwidth. You’ll feel relieved from completing these small tasks out of sheer disproportionate value to their simplicity and weight.
Finetune your productivity
Ask yourself how you can get your tasks done more efficiently? How can you become more of a master time manager moving forward? If you’re not already asking yourself this question, now is the time to start.
If you can accomplish more in less time, you’ll free up hours for projects or goals you didn’t think you had time for. Common time-sucks can include excessive checking of your emails, social media scrolling and not keeping timelines of your projects.
One way to be more productive in the New Year is to start time-blocking. Smartphones now include activity monitors for screen time, which you can set to varying intervals based on what you think is appropriate. Try time-blocking for activities in 20-minute increments. Answer as many emails as you can, limit your social media use to this amount, or create project sub tasks around this productivity tactic.
Change your self-narratives
When you reflect on the year prior, it can be constructive to also take a look at where you’ve had challenges. Oftentimes, when we do this, our entire self-narrative changes for the negative.
Watch how you talk to yourself when you assess where and what didn’t go so well for in the past year. Look at ways that you can reframe those challenges to be different or assess how you would alter your choices if the same problems arose again. Revise your self-talk by reminding yourself the importance of aiming for progress instead of perfection and chalk it up to valuable lessons learned that’ll make you better as a result.
When we think about the New Year as a fresh start, we enter into it more motivated, passionate and determined. Setting yourself up for success in the New Year starts with preparation now.