Your Organizing Coach

How to Make New Year's Resolutions

This year, don't let your New Year's resolutions be just another list of to do's that you never get to and feel guilty about. Here are some tips on how to make some resolutions that you can actually keep.

• Don't pick too many

Challenging yourself is a great idea, but be kind to yourself too. Keep in mind that a resolutions typically involve major changes in lifestyle and habits, and those don't occur overnight.

If you've decided to get organized, for example, which appears on lots of top ten most popular resolutions lists, you'll need to break that goal down into many subgoals with tasks for each. Some examples are "open and sort the mail everyday" and "spend five minutes clearing off my desk every evening." You could even put those down as resolutions.

• Set later start dates

The start of the year is a natural time to make changes. If it's not right for you, though, because you got that terrible cold that's going around, or you have family commitments that keep you occupied, just postdate your resolutions.

Adding a date to a goal is a good practice anyway. It makes it more specific and more real. You won't be able to fool yourself into thinking you'll start "tomorrow." So date your resolutions to start at the beginning of March, or another date when you'll have the time and energy to act on them.

• Stagger them

Trying to honor all your resolutions at once will probably just frustrate you and make you quit all of them. Give yourself a better shot at success by starting one at a time.

Pick the most pressing one to start first and then wait until you've developed some new habits to support that resolution (hint: when an activity becomes a habit, you don't have to think about it very much). A few months later, you'll be ready to take on a new challenge and give it your full attention.

You May Go on Vacation, but Your Email Doesn't

Going back to work after vacation is often a let down. On top of that, there's all the work that's been waiting for you and the dreaded email inbox that, if each message were printed out, would bury your office knee deep in paper.

A very concise and easy to use method for cutting that inbox down to size is provided in a post from one of the David Allen Co. blogs. Here's Kelly's first step:

First, I knew the morning I got back to work I'd have about 6x more input than normal, so I blocked that extra time on my calendar to give myself the time I would need to get it processed. I think this is essential. There is no way a week of email can be processed in the same time I normally allow.

There are two important points here. One is that email takes a lot of time to go through if you're actually going to do something about the messages and not just scan through them.

Two is that it's really important to set aside time to deal with email (or any task that doesn't seem urgent). If you don't and you just throw yourself into catching up on everything at once, you relegate handling emails to a minute here and a minute there, while you're checking for new emails. Or it all goes into a "pending" folder to be looked at when you catch up on everything else.

I find it helpful to sort my inbox by sender, topic or thread. That way I can easily identify emails that contain old information, answered questions and preliminary plans that I can safely delete.

Perfectionism or Death

What's the biggest problem with perfectionists? It's that they don't know they have a problem!

Perfectionism is a habit that people are proud of, even when it causes them anxiety and trouble. This New York Times article describes how being a perfectionist can lead to mental health problems and even suicide, not to mention garden variety unhappiness and stress.

In the areas of time management and organizing, I see people abandoning or not taking on projects at all because they don't believe they can do them perfectly. Or spending disproportionate amounts of time on tasks that are very low priority, but capable of being "perfected," while avoiding more important, unperfectable tasks.

The article mentions several aphorisms that perfectionists live by, such as, "Never accept second best." Another one I hear a lot that I disagree with is, "Anything worth doing is worth doing well." Baloney! Plenty of things are worth doing just adequately so you can get on with the really important stuff.