Part 1: I Don’t Make New Year’s Resolutions

With the start of a new year comes a lot of resolutions – almost everyone in the world makes a resolution or two at the start of a new year.

Many business leaders like to use this time to set goals that will help their organisations grow more successfully over the next few months.

But not all!

How do some of the business greats handle their New Year’s resolutions? What New Year strategies do they and others use to stay focused in the year ahead?

Tim Ferris: entrepreneur, investor, author, podcaster and lifestyle guru

Fortune Magazine recently selected his show, The Tim Ferris Show, as their top business podcast. It has now surpassed 300M downloads.

Tim Ferris no longer sets New Year’s resolutions. Instead he does “past year reviews”. He finds them more informed, valuable, and actionable. This is how he does it:

• Grab a notepad and create two columns: POSITIVE and NEGATIVE.
• Go through your calendar from this last year, looking at every week.
• Note any people, activities, or commitments that caused high positive or negative emotions. Put them in their respective columns.
• Once you’ve gone through this past year, look at your notepad list and ask “What 20% of each column produced the most reliable or powerful peaks?”
• Armed with this information, relabel the “negative” column so it reads “Not-to-do list.” Keep this list where you can see it to remind you of the people and things that make you miserable.
• Next, review the items in the “positive” column and schedule more of those events in the new year. Start booking events with friends and pre-paying for activities and commitments that you know will bring positive outcomes.
• “Get the positive things on the calendar ASAP,” Ferris wrote, lest they get crowded out by noise and distraction. “It’s not real until it’s on the calendar.”