Best Results Organizing

Snuggled in this week, tucked away between two major holidays, it’s tempting to rush to end the year with some sense of completion on those unfinished tasks. As much as we’d like to be mindfully in the present, we’re zipping along, trying to impose control in an era when there’s very little control to be had.

So today, I propose you take a breather. Bask in the quiet glow before we rush headlong into the future. Take time to do a little review of the past year so you can feel renewed, and if not in control, at least in awareness, for 2022.

TAKE A BACKWARD GLANCE

The best way to grow is to built on one’s successes. Grab a cup of cocoa (or whatever makes you feel alert but cozy) and settle in someplace comfy.

Pull out your calendar, whether it’s digital or paper bound, and start taking note of your successes, achievements, and delights. Personally, I think it’s best to keep a running list on paper (I mean, I am Paper Doll, after all), but if you prefer a spreadsheet, Word doc, or a note in Evernote, by all means, go with what feels comfy.

Look Beyond the Obvious

You can definitely list big accolades, awards, or milestones. Sure, mark down when you hit your revenue goal or finished that marathon. But look at those subtle successes, too.

What did you stick with, even when it was hard? Success isn’t always marked by what you attain, but how you persevere!

What did you try, even though it was out of your comfort zone? Succeeding at what you’re good at is worthy of pride, but stepping up to do something scary but potentially rewarding? That’s magical. (For more on that, check out my Sara Skillen’s Organizing and Big Scary Goals: Working With Discomfort and Doubt To Create Real Life Order.) 

What surprisingly good things occurred that you had never even thought to imagine in the first place?

What dreams came true? Where did you decide to make new dreams when the old ones proved untenable (due to life or world circumstances)?

Janet Barclay’s excellent Set Your Compass to Reach Your Goals for the New Year introduced me to the free, downloadable YearCompass, an international marvel. Even if you get nothing else from today’s post, I encourage you to download this fillable, printable PDF and explore the questions. Examine your past year and get guidance for going forward.

I’m working my way through the digital version now, and it’s providing more insight than I’ve received from any prior annual review.

If you prefer an even deeper dive (and are willing to use up lots of Post-its®), try doing a life audit, examining the past, present, and future of your life. Or go shallower, cut to the chase, and stick to Apartment Therapy’s 6 Smart Questions to Ask Yourself at the End of the Year.

Not everyone can weave a tapestry of the past year out of the blocks of a calendar, so this is just a start. If you journal, flip through the pages to look for highlights, and recognize that bad days are actually achievements. You got through them and made it through the other side. (You’re here to read this, right?)

Surf through your social media posts. You may be surprised by what you find on LinkedIn or Facebook (or, yes, TikTok or Instagram). Look for a sense of all the big and little ways you did your thing, or helped others do their things! In particular, look at places where you were tagged for shoutouts and gratitude. There are lots of people always touting having gratitude, but sometimes it’s nice to notice and remember when you did something worthy of someone else’s gratitude or kudos.

Ah, kudos! Speaking of which, definitely check your Success Folder! Don’t have one? Create one! Actually, create two.

Have a digital success folder where you put emails that praise or thank you, or otherwise give you warm fuzzies. While you may get fewer and fewer things by mail, have a paper folder for collecting such tangible high-fives. On days where you are down on yourself, feel under-appreciated, or are disappointed, pulling out something that reminds you that “good stuff happens” and that you’re part of that chain of events is going to lift your spirits.

Engage With Your Village

Raising a child isn’t the only thing that takes a village; count on others to help lift your spirits and give you insight.

Talk to your people. We’re not always good at keeping formal records of our successes, but our friends and loved ones automatically catalog the snazzy things about us. Once, a friend was entering the workforce for the first time in decades, and was bemoaning the fact that she had no marketable skills. But because I’d known her (just about) forever, I was able to recite everything from events she’d run as a volunteer coordinator to the time she caught a PTA high muckety-muck embezzling! She sure-as-heck had marketable skills, but couldn’t immediately see them in herself, let alone recognize her own magnificence. 

Want to increase the magic? Recognize your own successes, but also pay attention to your friends’ and colleagues’ achievements. Share their blog posts on your social platforms instead of just clicking “like.” Promote their professional highlights. And send them emails and even write to them the old-fashioned way so they have something to put in their own Success Folders! 

MOVING FORWARD: TRIED AND TRUE FOR ’22

Armed with insight into what we achieved (and what we wish we had tried) in the prior year, we can approach the new year. First, we’ll look at the classic approaches, but we’ll also examine some exciting new ways to support our dreams as we move forward into 2022, even if it’s about to be “COVID’s junior year.”

Resolve to Evolve

In general, New Year’s resolutions come in two flavors, either positive or negative.

With positive resolutions, we say we’re going to proactively do something. Maybe we’ll do Couch-to-5K or learn a language. For negative resolutions, we plan to eliminate some aspect of our lives that we know is dragging us down, so we vow to go on a diet or stop hate-watching The Bachelorette.

Photo by freestocks.org from Pexels

Resolutions date back many, many centuries. Four thousand years ago, the Babylonians promised the gods they would return borrowed objects and repay outstanding debts. (If only the Babylonians had had professional organizers to help them declutter and locate the borrowed stuff and couch cushion money.)

The Romans promised their two-faced god Janus, who looked simultaneously backward and to the future, that they’d be good in the year to come. And for several hundred years, Christian watch night services have included traditions of reflecting on the prior year and making resolutions for the one to come.

In the United States, resolution-making continues to increase; up to 40% of the population makes a New Year’s resolution. On the up-side, these resolutions help us start the new year in a motivated, positive way – right when the weather, the amount of sunlight, our bank balances, and our moods are at an annual low-ebb. December 31st is when we feel our age and recognize the passing of another year of unfulfilled potential; resolutions rev our engines.

On the down-side, the vast majority of people abandon their resolutions before February. Resolutions fizzle for three reasons:

• our real lives get in the way (year after year after year)
• our resolutions may be things we’re supposed to do, but aren’t passionate about 
• we haven’t identified working strategies for achieving our resolutions

So, if you are going to make a resolution, make sure you’re picking things that excite and challenge you, but also figure out how to eliminate the past obstacles and ease your path.

For inspiration on developing new or different resolutions, consider some of the following:

Good Housekeeping‘s 60 Achievable New Year’s Resolutions for Healthier and Happier Living 2022 has less all-encompassing, more bit-sized resolutions, like “Prioritize age-appropriate health screenings,” “eat more vegetables,” and “listen to novels while you work out.

The Pioneer Woman has 40 New Year’s Resolution Ideas to Start 2022 Right, with some fun, sociable ideas like “give more compliments,” “send more cards,” and “make time to spend with family and friends.”

And Antimaximalist’s whopping 67 New Year’s Resolutions for 2022 prioritizes hopeful notions like, “Don’t settle for less than you deserve” and “Be less afraid of making mistakes.”

You can resolve to do things that are fun, too. Gretchen Rubin made a list of 21 things she wanted to do in 2021: 

Here’s my 21 for 2021 list. I got a fair number of things crossed off my list. Now I’m writing my 22 for 2022 list—and deciding what items to carry over from 2021. pic.twitter.com/KmdMXUBAPu

— Gretchen Rubin (@gretchenrubin) December 21, 2021

and has a PDF to help you track your 22 in ’22. 

Embrace Good Goals and Happy Habits

So, how can you supercharge your resolutions? Maybe stop thinking of them as big, sparkly things you resolve to do (with the unspoken societal expectation that it’ll all fall through), and consider the less flashy younger siblings of resolutions, ye old goals and habits. 

Think of goals as providing the big-picture framework, the big city markers on the map; habits are the turn-by-turn directions to get you where you want to go. 

SMART goals are popular because they identify where resolutions and plans often fail.

• Specific (What are you going to do? Use action verbs! Where and when are you going to put these efforts into effect? With whose help or partnership will you get there?)
• Measurable (What metrics will you use to show you’ve done what you said you’d do? How many miles per day? How many lessons per week? How many blocks of time for achieving specific tasks?)
• Achievable (Is this a practical goal? Is it realistic?)
• Relevant (Does this goal make sense for your life, family, or business?)
• Time-based (When will you start? When will you perform the action? When will you repeat it? When will you finish? Remember, “Someday” is not a day on the calendar!)

And Paper Doll readers know that I prefer SMARTY goals, where that Y reflects the idea that these are goals that are meaningful to YOU, not your mother-in-law, boss, or favorite Instagram influencer.

Whether you want to lose weight, pay off debt, find a significant other, or grow your business, the goal can’t just be a vague “what I want” without any guideposts. Make sure your goals spell out what you’re going to do, how you’re going to do it, and how you’re going to measure your success.

So, if your goals set the rules and create the game plan, habits are how you get to the finish line.

If your goal is to get to work on time every day, but you often find yourself searching the house for your keys, wallet, phone, and charger, then you’ll want to develop a habit of assigning a “home” and always putting those items in the home upon returning to your house, before you even take off your shoes. If your goal is to be prepared at tax time, then your habits involve doing weekly record-keeping and filing, and not waiting until April 12th to get started.

Habits are your settled or repeated tendencies. Sure, bad habits become second nature, making them hard to break, but good habits are hard to break, too! So, if you can get in the habit of repeating positive, life-affirming tasks, you stand a much better chance of achieving your goals.

I recommend a few superior books for understanding how habits work, and how you can put them to use in your life. Both are becoming modern classics.

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg walks you through the research and the practical ways you can use habits to improve the likelihood of achieving your goals. The central concept is that every habit has a cue-routine-reward loop. Modify or enhance your routine based on an environmental cue (depending on whether you want to cut out the bad stuff or do more of the good stuff), and you can inch closer to your goals.

Duhigg also talks about the halo effect of keystone habits, where starting or modifying certain habits will have a knock-on effect, improving other areas of your life. Kids whose families have a habit of eating together do better in school and have more confidence.

Yes, it’s probably true that families who eat together are less dysfunctional in the first place, and likely include parents with more flexible jobs that allow them to be home at the same time. Correlation is not causation, but on the off chance that making the effort to open your mail and file your papers helps you pay bills on time and get out of debt faster, or making your bed makes you more productive, why not try?

James Clear’s excellent Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones concentrates on the keys to developing habits, from changing your environment to make it better support your habits to overcoming lack of willpower or motivation. Clear also explains how to get back in the saddle after falling off your habit horse. 

TAKE A DIFFERENT VIEW FOR ’22

So, resolutions are like New Year’s Eve champagne; fizzy, but they soon go flat. Goals and habits are the workhorses of achievement, but they’re not exactly sexy. Sometimes, our behaviors are less of an obstacle than our attitudes, and when we upgrade our attitudes, our actions fall in line. It’s important to know what you need, and what will inspire you. 

There are three popular styles of approaching your upcoming year with a new mindset.

Words Matter

Have you heard about developing a Word of the Year?

Instead of a big, formal plan, identify a word (or phrase) that encapsulates the emotional heft of what you want your year to look and feel like, and you use the word to help you focus your efforts.

It can be a noun, verb, or adjective. I was going to joke that it probably shouldn’t be an interjection, but there are many articles that advise trying to live your life such that if it isn’t a “hell, yeah!” then it’s a no.

(That said, your word of the year probably shouldn’t be a conjunction.)

When in doubt, ask yourself “Does this event/date/person/purchase align with my word of the year?”

This word can be serious or lighthearted, as long as it focuses on what you want to do, have, or be. But the meaning of the word should resonate with you.

One year, I picked the word “resilience,” but then found that so many things happened in that year from which I had to bounce back! If my word for that year had been “energize” or “cultivate” or whatnot, I might not have felt like a cloud was hanging over me. And I started 2020 with a word I liked so much that I turned it into a mock ad campaign, “Ample: it’s not just for bosoms anymore!” But then everyone’s 2020 was amply filled in ways that did not charm or delight.

Speaking of delight, which was my 2021 word, it hit the perfect note. Yes, the world was still wackadoodle this year, but somehow I found small delights in positive actions and happenings, and when I asked myself, “Will doing this delight me (or someone I care about)?” it really helped guide my decisions!

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

To identify your word of the year, go in one of two directions. 

• Look back on 2021 and ask yourself, “What do I need more of? What was I missing last year? What would have given me strength or self-confidence or a better grip on my emotional well-being?” What word keeps coming up?
• Look forward, and start with (what would normally be) your resolutions or goals in mind. By the end of 2022, what word would you like to have had resonate with you? Structure? Boundaries? Or perhaps Freedom or (Financial) Independence?

Feeling the need for a thesaurus (or, as my high school boyfriend tried to tell me it was alternatively called, a synonymograph)? See if any words or concepts from the following sources work for you:

Four Steps to Your 2022 Word of the Year from the Messy Bun Mafia

How to Pick One Word for the Year 2022 from Midlife Rambler

Tips for Choosing Your Word of the Year from MountainModernLife.com

Word of the Year Ideas for a Better 2022 from The Goal Chaser (and her How to Make Your “Word of the Year” Really Stick) 

Do More Words Mean More Success?

One word isn’t always enough. Some people need a word for themselves, a word for their family, and a word for their businesses. Others need one word each for mind, body, and spirit. Who are we to judge?

Strategist Chris Brogan has been selecting three words for more than a decade. He usually posts his words on New Year’s Day, so until then, you can look at his 2021 post with links to his three words each year going back to 2006.

Your Word Doesn’t Have to Make Sense to Anyone Else

Your word of the year doesn’t have to be in English.

Recently, I was reading an article about how an independent publisher had been told she needed to come up with a name for her publishing enterprise, and she picked bramgioia, Italian for “yearning for joy.” If your goal for next year is to be less of a mouse and more of a lion, chutzpah, Yiddish for “extreme self-confidence or audacity” might be the word for you.

You could even pick a code word. Through a sequence of events and nicknames better forgotten, a high school friend and I came to refer to her crush as “Crater Lake, Oregon.” Nobody needs to know what your code word really means. The point is that you know, and every time you say it, write it, or see it, it will motivate you in the direction you choose.

Om, Om, Oh man, I need a Mantra!

Is a resolution too rigid, a goal too structured, and a single word too abstract? Maybe you need a Mantra of the Year. Mantras can be affirmations or quotes you want to embody. Mike Vardy calls it his Annual Axiom. (For 2021, he picked “Whatever it takes, no matter what.”)

A mantra, whether it’s a short quote, a repeated statement, or a slogan, has an inspirational aspect. Your mantra can help you self-soothe, motivate you, and provide an even clearer sense of the vision you want your actions to reflect.

Your mantra can be as simple as “No drama” or it can be as challenging as one that I’ve considered for myself, “I will be kind, even when the impulse is to be right.” 

Your mantra can be as simple as *No drama* or it can be as challenging as one that I've considered for myself, *I will be kind, even when the impulse is to be right.*  Click To Tweet

Another format is to choose some variation on “More X, less Z” like “More extraordinary, less ordinary,” or “Move more, sit less” or “Appreciate more, complain less.”

For some inspiration, check out 10 Mantras for a More Meaningful New Year from Huffington Post. Mantras for 2022 from the UK’s Mantra Jewellery’s blog has some visually stunning options.

I’VE GOT MY WORD(S). NOW WHAT?

Keep your resolutions, your goals, your habits, your words, or your mantras in the forefront of your mind until you know them by heart. How?

Set a reminder on your phone to pop up with your mantra every three hours during the “awake” part of your day.

Post your word, Ted Lasso-style, all over your workplace or house, from signs over the office doorway to sticky notes on the bathroom mirror.

via GIPHY

Create a vision board. From Oprah Daily to Jack Canfield advice abounds!

Recite your resolution, word or mantra every night before you go to sleep and upon waking. (If necessary, put a sticky note on your phone so you’re prompted when your alarm goes off.)

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Do you make resolutions? Set annual goals? Have a word or mantra?

Dear readers, whether you choose a resolution, a goal (with habits), a word (in whatever language you choose) or a mantra, I think you’re spiffy just the way you are.

I wish you a happy, healthy, and organized 2022!