We are almost coming to the end of the year 2020. A year which has been unprecedented in each one of our lives. A year which rejigged old beliefs, old ways of working, old ways of interaction and communication, old ways of doing business and even old ways of celebrating festivals and ceremonies.

A new year is fast approaching us. Like every new year, this approaching year also brings along lot of hopes and rekindles our belief to do better and better each year and to keep pushing ourselves towards the achievement of our true potential.

There is an awesome sense of happiness all around us as we enter the month of January each year. It is so wonderful when you see most of the people around you charged up and motivated, ready to do big things and make a fresh start to unaccomplished goals of the past. It is encouraging to see more people in the gym, more people embracing healthy diets, more people trying to become better than before.

However, it is extremely disappointing to note a couple of months later that the gym visitors decline drastically, diet cola is the only thing that remains in the diet foods and we just get busy with the same mundane. All of us these days live our lives in the fast lane, are most of the time always busy and we feel we don’t have enough time to work on our resolutions. By February March, we are content if we are simply able to keep to our to-do lists though that itself becomes challenging. As the first quarter slips away, we realize that one by one each month would slip out of hands and another year would be over.

Let’s do some advance planning while we still have time on hand to ensure that the year approaching us is different and better. Let’s make this new year our best year ever. To make the new year our best year ever, our actions should be different and for the better. It is very rightly said, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten.”

To live a better life, not only do we need to have good intentions which I believe all of us have, we also need to take concrete actions to be better individuals professionally, socially, and personally.

While no one can add even an extra second to the 24 hours that we get each day, we can certainly take steps to better utilise these 24 hours. The following is a list of 10 very simple and easy steps we can take which can produce visible effective results and can help you to make this new year a “happy” new year.

  1. Stay Happy: It can be as simple as being happy. Make conscious efforts to smile more often and to think positive. Positive thoughts will bring happiness into your lives. Feel good about yourself. It is proven research that people who feel good about themselves perform better not only at work but are better individuals in their personal lives as well. The same people who laugh and have fun with their families and friends come to the office with grumpy faces. Bring that happiness and energy to work. If you are not happy at the office, you need to either change your attitude or your work. Breeding negativity inside will do you more harm in the long run than anything else. Besides, we also let others to come in and take our happiness away from us. Avoid negative colleagues who always indulge you into negative and pessimistic thoughts. Always remember, “Some people are like clouds. When they disappear, it’s a brighter day.”
  2. Get Off Distractions: In today’s connected world, we sometimes get over-connected and overindulgent with social media and gaming platforms. While it is good to be connected with your friends and other networks, if it goes beyond limits, it can actually be harmful for your productivity. What’s the point in chasing other people’s lives, their photographs, their holidays while your efficiency and productivity suffers? Limit your social media interactions, avoid the fortnite battle royale, the league of legends, the candy crushes and the angry birdz. Live your own life fully and try making it better. No hell will break loose if you don’t check on your friends’ pictures for a day. Remember, “Time is the most valuable resource you have on hand, your life depends on how you choose to spend your time.”
  3. Develop an Attitude of Gratitude: It is always easy to get caught up in things and thinking about how they could be different. Life doesn’t always turn out the way we want it to. However, if we would just pause and think, we would realize all is never lost. Despite a failure, there may be instances that you may find you could be grateful for. In fact, if you just take a step back and think, you would realize that you are such a lucky person to have been blessed with so many things in life which so many people crave for. Thank God for your healthy being, thank God for having been blessed with a family, thank God to have given you food on the table, thank God for having a home to live in, thank God all the more for the fact that you are alive. Try spending time with your spouse, your children. Call your parents often. Plan a holiday with your family that you have been wanting for long. Cherish and relish the little things you have in your life. Take care of the relationships that you take for granted. Thinking about the good things in your life improves your mood because as per research this reduces your stress hormones by about 23%. Count your blessings rather than having a complaining outlook to life. Remember, “Talking about problems is an addiction…break this habit and talk about your happy moments.”
  4. Be Grounded: We as human beings are naturally programmed to expect being treated with respect. Irrespective of our roles and titles we should always stay on the ground, be polite and humble to others, control our tempers, and never undermine the value of human life. We should always treat others in a similar way as we would expect to be treated by others. Wonderful words from Ralph Waldo Emerson said it all, “For every minute you are angry, you lose sixty seconds of happiness.”
  5. Design Your Life Plan: This is extremely important. If you don’t already have one, this year is the time to design your life plan. A life plan is a document which is unique to you and covers the dimensions of your life, whether it is financial, career, marital, social, parental, physical & mental health, personal development & growth and spiritual. Unless each life dimension doesn’t move in tandem and harmony, your life will experience stress and anxiety. I am a person of faith and spiritual dimension is absolutely important. For those who are not, may skip that dimension from their life plan.
  6. Handle Procrastination Head-On: Procrastination is the practice of doing more pleasurable and less urgent things first instead of less pleasurable and more urgent things. All of us get too tempted first thing in the morning to check our emails, status updates, and messages on social media or to start with easier and non-urgent tasks which are easy to get off our to-do lists. Our decision is driven more by the ease rather than the urgency of the tasks at hand. This results in the urgent tasks remaining undone till later in the day compromising on your deliverables and adding to the stress that the undone task would bring along. You may then be sitting late in the office finishing off the urgent task while you could have been spending that time with your family and friends had the urgent task been done first thing in the morning. Procrastination is very common with all of us. The key is to take it head-on first thing in the morning. Atleast 2 big urgent tasks should be done in the morning before you touch anything else. As Brian Tracy has written in his bestselling book, ‘Eat That Frog’, if you eat a live frog first thing in the morning, nothing worse can happen to you later in the day. Consider the urgent task as a ‘live frog’ and do it first thing in the morning. The non-urgent tasks can be done later in the day and can even be taken up the next day should you run out of time. Plan ahead better, break your tasks into sub-tasks, and take procrastination head-on. Mark Twain has wonderfully said, “If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.”
  7. Eat Healthy and Stay Fit: Being a fitter and a healthier individual will definitely bring happiness to your life and make the new year “happy”. You may have been making this resolution every year and may be failing to keep up to it. What I suggest is not to strive for achieving a 20kgs weight reduction quickly or to get a perfect body to compete in a Mr. or a Miss Universe competition. Atleast start taking the baby steps. Try losing weight over a longer term and a more reasonable period. Atleast walk or do some exercises to avoid falling sick rather than building muscles. There are numerous researchers who have repeatedly proven that healthy individuals are less prone to diseases largely caused by high stress levels in a persons’ body. Try eating a healthy diet each day and take out atleast 20 minutes each day to go for a walk or do some exercises. If you do more, all the more better. You may be the busiest person in your workplace with back to back meetings all day but everything has to wait when you are sick and unable to move out of your bed. Always remember the wise old saying that “Health is the Best Wealth” and “All is Lost if Health is Lost”.
  8. Learn Something New: Let this new year help you to become a better individual. Try learning something completely new which you have never done before. Read books of your interest. Take up a course that you may have been wanting to. Try developing yourself. You never know the new thing you pick up this year ultimately becomes your passion and changes your life for good forever. Remember learning is a lifelong process and as C.S. Lewis rightly said, “You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.”
  9. Spend time with yourselves: This new year, try spending some time alone with yourselves. We are always rushing for one meeting after another and forget to make time for the most important meeting with ourselves. Planning our day before we really jump into our daily hustle bustle can definitely reduce our stress levels and boost our efficiency and productivity. Choose whatever time suits you best but do make time for planning. You could plan your day the previous evening/ night before if that suits you. Also, try spending an hour each weekend to plan for the activities of the next week/ month and even to review your medium to long term goals. Make sure you capture each and every commitment that you give either to yourselves or to others and ensure that tasks required to be done to fulfill such commitments appropriately get onto your to-do lists. This planning activity equips you much better to handle all these tasks smoothly and to significantly enhance your productivity levels. This reflection time will also help you understand what are the tasks that should not be on your to-do lists. There may be tasks we have been carrying on without sometimes analysing that they are really not adding any value to our life plan. As they say, “Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail.”
  10. Help and Develop Others: Life is a tough game for all of us. Aim to help and develop others who are in need or are less privileged than us. All of us are born for a reason and have our own set of unique capabilities. Your little acts of kindness can make things better for others and in turn, give you an immense sense of satisfaction and fulfillment. You do not need to do anything grand, extravagant, or elaborate. Be intentional about genuinely helping others. Look out to the avenue of your choice. You may want to volunteer for a social cause or a non-profit. You may look out to your friends, co-workers, etc. and identify someone who is in need of your help. Try helping and developing someone with no expectations in return. You will see a tremendous sense of happiness and achievement. Make a point to “Help people even when you know they can’t help you back.”

Also, remember, small steps taken in the right direction is better than not walking at all. Conscious efforts made to work on the steps suggested above are bound to help improve your lives. I will leave you with the powerful words from Gretchen Rubin:

“By doing a little bit each day, you can get a lot accomplished.”

Happy reading

– Nalin Chandna