As the new year approaches, a lot of people take time to reflect on the past year, what’s to come, as well as how they’re going to try to make change for the better. I don’t know if it’s because New Year’s follows the insane holiday season, or we’re stuck in that weird dead zone when work, school, and any other responsibility seems to disappear. There’s almost a limbo-like suspension in time at the end of December. This may be why we hyper-focus on goals and fantasize about all of the great changes we ought to be making. Everything is quiet and we can actually pay attention and internally reflect.
For some people and most businesses this isn’t so much the case. Businesses, still have resolutions they need to make. There’s the year-end scramble bringing about budget and business planning, closing as much business as possible before Q1 begins. Bring on more clients, meet said expectations, don’t exceed this budget, go to market with this product, etc. It doesn’t seem as fun or as inspirational as the “join a gym”, “quit smoking”, “stop creeping Facebook” goals, but very important nonetheless.
What are changes or resolutions that can benefit both personal and work goals? I think we sometimes try to compartmentalize our lives into separate categories; “this is my work life vs. this is my personal life”. Seems easy enough, but truth is we’re still the same people no matter if we’re sitting on our couch or in our office chair. We may try to disconnect from work, but we’ll find ourselves constantly checking our emails, or being in a certain mood when you get home after a stressful day. We also try to disconnect from our personal lives at work, but let’s face it, you have those days when you carry your bad juju into the office too. Knowing that those outside issues are going to affect you and possibly your work/home life is already going in the right direction, you now need to deal with it accordingly and not be in denial.
A couple things we can try committing to this year;
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- Accept that we aren’t different people in different environments, no matter how hard we try to compartmentalize and separate ourselves from work and home. Yes, we still have to be professional and know boundaries, but there is still an allowable human aspect to our working persona.
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- Let’s quit trying to multi-task. Multi-tasking is just a fancy term for half-assing multiple things at once. How many times have you tried juggling several tasks, just to become frustrated and have to start over? We all do it, we think it makes us awesome at our jobs. It doesn’t, it adds extra stress for no reason.
- Give everything you care about, your full and undivided attention and be in the present. You are in the present no matter how much you are working towards the future, or living in the past. Sure, you can learn from past experiences to influence the future, but you are literally living moment by moment. Be aware and be in the moment, otherwise, you’ll soon be in December of 2018 wondering where the heck the year went.