Few of us are experts at keeping our New Year’s resolutions, but fewer still feel comfortable not making any at all, no matter how many years of promises to ourselves we’ve broken. Resolutions are free, positive thought is healthy and breeds action, and the new year is simply an irresistible time to think about this stuff. So here are some relatively easy ways you can think about to improve your life at work in 2019.
1. Give yourself a daily review – Don’t wait for your boss, and don’t wait for the next quarterly review to come around. You know when you’ve done good and valuable work for your company, and you also know that the downside of the increased autonomy of the modern workplace is that you don’t always get noticed or praised for every win. So look at your workday yourself, note the things you might do better in the future, and give yourself a little mental gold star for the win nobody else had time to notice. We could all stand to be a little kinder to ourselves (and even to our mistakes) and a workday is a great place to start giving yourself credit when due.
2. Fine-tune the work-life balance – Giving your job the full attention it (and your career) deserves is a mammoth undertaking, so much so that we regularly allow our “personal time” to be sacrificed little-by-little. But for a healthily humming psyche, you need to make sure that your binge-watching and nature hikes are given their share of your life’s focus and passion, along with the more serious stuff. They may not feel as important in terms of week-to-week stakes, but truly happy people always find time to go fly a kite (thanks, “Mary Poppins”) once in a while with as much steely-eyed focus as they balance books back at the office.
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3. Keep healthy at work – Don’t excuse a long unbroken sit or a lunch of chips and soda just by saying you’re busy. Mobile phones allow for some of the most important work tasks to be performed remotely, and even the most driven worker needs a few brisk walks around the block and a satisfying, energizing lunch to keep the midnight oil burning – especially at 3:45 in the afternoon. It’s the basic maintenance of the machine that is you, and you can’t skip your mental or physical health and expect the rest of you to continue performing powerfully.
4. Read more – There’s no excuse to ever stop learning, and there’s certainly no excuse to ever stop reading books. The knowledge of the ages awaits those with the keys to the kingdom, so make sure to schedule a book at least every month to expand your mental horizons just a few yards further. It can be a book about the latest ideas in your industry, or it can be an eighteenth century guide to badminton – you’ll learn something useful either way.
5. Clean out your email inbox – Here’s an easy one if you’re having a tough time getting going with the resolutions. Just take a scythe to your inbox and get rid of everything you don’t need any more: unimportant junk, stuff that was important until yesterday, and stuff that stopped being important three years ago. Just seeing a reasonably harvested email inbox can give you an invaluable little good start to your day.
6. Keep your sense of humor in working order – Always remember to stay funny, and to keep the next usable punch line locked and loaded. Humor can ease tension, endear you to people, even remind them how sharp and fast your mind works in non-humorous situations. Of course there are moments in life, and especially at work, when a wisecrack isn’t appropriate, but the fact that there may be one just around the corner should never be too far from your mind. That’s life, and life is funny.
