New Year’s resolutions you should be making about time management

You likely already have too many goals and too many disappointments from this past year. So as you look ahead to 2020, the idea of adding more seems kind of exciting but also a bit forbidding. That’s why as a time management coach, I recommend that you do the opposite: 【小题1】

Know less

It’s okay not to be up-to-date on everything. To cut down on these distractions, you might turn off social media notifications on your phone. 【小题2】 Unsubscribe from notification emails or newsletters you don’t read regularly.

Resolution: I resolve to be less aware of “interesting” things so I can be interested in and present for the people around me.

Care less

This one may sound a bit unfeeling.You may want to be a kind and thoughtful person for your friends and family and to serve your clients well. 【小题3】 What that means is that you say “No” a lot.

Here is a way:

I am at the service of my customers Monday through Friday, during the day. 【小题4】 Being able to unplug from work in my personal time increases my ability to serve my clients well when I’m in the office.

Resolution: 【小题5】 Consequently, I can match my time with my highest priorities and take better care of the people closest to me.

Is it easy to do less? No. But will it lead you to the best outcomes in the end? Yes. You’ll thank yourself for it at the end of 2020.

If planning offers so many benefits, why do many professionals resist it? Some are more comfortable with acting, and therefore don’t want to devote so much time to it, or they think their circumstances are so likely to change that planning is useless. Other people complain that things are going so well or so badly that there’s no point in planning. Finally, some people don’t make strategic plans because they can’t recognize the difference between strategic and short term, operational planning—how to get where you’ve already decided to go.

Circumstances do change, and it’s reasonable to wonder about the value of planning when things are changing so rapidly. But the plans we are talking about are not set in concrete. They are adaptable frameworks, goals, that can conform to(顺应) changing circumstances. There’s nothing wrong with changing direction, if we know what we’re doing and understand our own reasoning.Why plan if things are going fine? Won’t they continue like this? Won’t the skills we now use always be in demand? Probably not—especially in science and technology. Being prepared for new situations is a leading reason for having a strategic plan in the first place. Even if we cannot predict everything that will affect our path, we have a better chance of dealing with it effectively if we’ve thought ahead.Things are going terribly, and I can’t bother planning because survival is the name of the game right now. Good reasoning. If it seems that it’s going to be a close call just to reach that contracted goal, don’t worry about starting a new overall strategy. But most of us often think things are worse than they truly are. If you are continually moving from one crisis(危机) to another, you may need to take some time off to understand why. Are you really heading where you want to go? What changes in direction could prevent some of these crises in the first place？

So, spend some time thinking about your future, outline your plans, and discuss them with people close to you. Strategic planning takes work, but it pays off. It’s an exciting way to create the future rather than just coast into it.

We are all time travelers on a journey into the future. However, we are not tourists with guides who can tell us just what lies ahead. Instead, we are explorers in an unknown area.

In our personal lives, we often feel the unknown in our future when we start college, take a new job, or open a business. We never can be sure what will happen to us. But the great explorers of the past would tell us that we have a better chance of succeeding if we prepare ourselves as well as possible.

Though those explorers are not here to advise us personally, we have descriptions of their expeditions(探险), and from these we can draw the lessons they would have offered for our journey into the unknown future. Reading records of great expeditions, we notice that the explorers prepared very carefully for their journeys. Their success depended on having the right equipment, the right supplies, the right teammates, and the right training.

So the first lesson of the great explorers is: Prepare for what you will face in the future. That may seem obvious, yet many people today see no point in preparing or even thinking about the future. “Let’s not worry about the future until we get there,” they say. The great explorers would have no use for such a person. Only a fool would imagine that problems will sit patiently waiting until we find a way to clear them up. However, problems may rush upon us at the worst possible moment, and our very survival can depend on how well we have prepared for them

Good preparation can work for us today as we plan how to deal with what we have to face. The well –prepared student does well on exams; the well-prepared job hunter gets hired. Most of us may think we have learned this lesson long ago, but we often seem to forget.