Your Best Year Yet!

For people like me, this week between Christmas and New Years is their secret, strategic weapon in Getting Things Done. It's good time to do three things, and I've three practical recommendations for you.

Looking back and Lessons Learned.

Okay, you've just about made it through 2005. What do you have to show for it? New, better, more friends, experiences, memories and money? Or 525,600 minutes you'd rather forget? Getting things done if they don't matter doesn't count.

Take a half an hour and tally up this year and what you accomplished: Column A is for bullet-pointing the things, people and experiences that made a difference in your life. Column B is reserved for the differences you made in other people's lives, be it your family, friends, company or online communities.

Column C? That's reserved for the first dozen or so lessons 2005 taught you that spring to mind as you read the items in the first two columns. You'd don't have to meditate on crystals to know that life has lessons to teach you, and if you don't learn them, you get to repeat them until you do learn them. Best to make up a cheat sheet based on 2005 than go into 2006 unprepared.

GTD Refresh

This week, grab a few hours to clean out your Getting Things Done process. That means at a minimum, make sure you've got Projects and Plans for what you're doing now, clean out all the crap from your My Documents, Outlook and paper folders, do a Weekly and a Monthly Review and think about what you want to do with your soon to be delivered bright and shiny new year.

Maybe that's planning New Years' Resolutions that are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timed). These resolutions have gotten a bad reputation in the MSM as proof positive we're all a bunch of good-for-nothing slackers: time to prove them wrong, pick 3 things you want to accomplish that will really make you feel better about yourself, and define how you get those 3 things done with SMART resolutions.

One last recommendation

If you are looking for a structured way of doing all this, I'd strongly recommend ordering from Amazon this book:

Your Best Year Yet! : Ten Questions for Making the Next Twelve Months Your Most Successful Ever

by Jinny S. Ditzler. This book is an excellent read, a great way to chart your course for the year ahead and more pragmatic than most of these kinds of books. I bought this book for 2000, had a great year, and then let it languish on a shelf until I started thinking about what I really want to get done in 2006.

Comments

[Antony]

Thanks for the suggestion - just completed the exercise and it was very useful.