How To Start The Year Off On The Right Foot

So, 2020 has finally started and today most of you will be back at work and back into your daily routines, The question is, how can you make your planned 2020 changes stick now that your regular daily life is back?

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Episode 114

Hello and welcome to episode 114 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.

This week, I want to help you start the year off on the right foot. So, there is no question this week except for the question I ask which is, how can I make my new year plans and goals stick?

It’s very easy to make plans for the new year while we are on a break, the difficulty comes when we return to our normal routines and our normal daily life. No matter how determined we might be to make this year the year we stick to our goals and plans for the new year, once we go back to our daily life, the same work, the same workplace, the same colleagues and bosses the same commute, it is so easy to slip back into the habits of old and before long find ourselves back where we were before the holidays or break and out carefully laid plans.

So how do you prevent this from happening?

Well, the first step is to anticipate possible areas of weakness. An example of this would be a smoker trying to give up. If you have always smoked a cigarette when you had a coffee, then temporarily stop drinking coffee. Instead, drink tea or another hot beverage. It’s the simple changes that will make all the difference in developing new habits.

Another example would be if you wanted to replace mindlessly scrolling through your social media feeds with reading a book or listening to a personal development podcast. The best way to do this is to remove the social media apps on your phone or tablet and replace them with your reading or podcast apps—in the exact same place. This way if you mindlessly tap on the area your social media apps used to be, you would open up your reading or podcast apps instead. That would normally be enough to bring you back on to your desired goal.

If you do have social media addiction really bad, then I would suggest you set some time each day for social media. Give yourself thirty to sixty minutes each day dedicated to social media and stick to it. Remove all opportunities to look at social media outside of these times.

To begin embedding new habits you may need to turn to your to-do list managers to help you here. One trick I have used that has worked in the past is to create daily recurring tasks that will pop up from time to time to remind me to do simple things. It could be a reminder to drink some water or to get up and move. You can create anything here. This also works for if you want to start the day with a morning ritual. This year, I want to start being more consistent with my morning routines. I have been experimenting over the last couple of years and finally developed a morning routine that works for me. From this week, I will dedicate my energy and attention to make sure I complete this every morning.

For this, I will use a combination of my to-do list manager and calendar. This way every time I look at my to-do list or calendar I will be reminded of my intention to turn my morning routine into a habit. My intention is to do this every morning and not just weekdays and when I am at home. I want to deeply embed it so I do this routine every morning. So from the moment I wake up, I will begin my routine. This helps on those days when I am not waking up early or I am waking up earlier than usual. Wake up, drink a glass of water, get out of bed and begin my stretching exercises. Just follow the same pattern every morning until it is embedded.

And that leads me to the next crucial part of this. Focus only on one area at a time. Let me give you a personal example of this.

For me, my first priority this year is to remove sugar and refined carbohydrates from my diet completely. This might seem a simple objective at first, but this involves researching the foods I currently eat to make sure there are no hidden sugars or refined carbohyd...