One of the things I love about Rosh Hashanah, is that it marks the start of a ‘New Year’ without all the pressure of resolutions (the honey cake is good too, but that’s irrelevant). In my book, if you want to lose weight, quit drinking juice from the carton or whatever then you don’t need to wait until the 1st of January to get started.
That being said, I think we all reflect over the last week of December and consider how we can make changes in our lives to make the following year truly super-duper. We always seem to want to share our resolutions too, which means we can’t keep it to ourselves when we break them on week three…oh no, all our friends, family and colleagues will be there to point it out a hundred times over that you’ve already broken that resolution which you were so excited about.
Ken Brand has already written a great post about resolutions, I for one will be joining him in stopping trying to train donkeys into stallions, but what else have I committed myself to?
Well, I’m not making any of the three most common resolutions made in the UK each year…
- Give up smoking.
- Start exercising.
- Resolve to not make resolutions.
Most people will include something to do with their eating habits/exercise regimes in the resolution list. Heck, I’m a woman, I spend all year promising myself ‘the diet starts Monday’, I don’t need to clutter my resolution list with anything health related! In fact, this year I’m making my resolution list strictly business related.
For 2009, I made a long list of things I’m going to do to make my working life more productive and efficient, most of them are very specific to my company so there’s no point publishing them here. But a couple might be useful ideas for you to take on board so I thought I’d share. I emailed my bosses the extensive list so unfortunately I’m going to have to stick with all of them!
- Meet more with my co-workers #IRL (in real life). With all the clever ways we can communicate these days it’s easy to forget what being in a face to face meeting can feel like. I do a lot of mycomms with my colleagues via Skype , email and even Twitter. The stupid thing is that most of the time we’re in the same office! We’re all busy, but sitting down together even for just 15 minutes can be a lot more productive than pinging emails back and forth.
- Give feedback to the right people. I get feedback from agents, users and colleagues every day about Globrix, feedback is invaluable to building a great product. But there’s no point collecting all the feedback and keeping it in a secret stash under your desk, pass on feedback (bad and good) to the relevant people so that it can be implemented/considered as appropriate.
- Keep in contact with those that matter. To me, that’s our agent clients and our users. I’ll be making sure we communicate with them effectively over the next year, I like to think that people see an email fromGlobrix and get excited because they know we’re emailing because of a dandy new feature or because they’re getting a newsletter rammed with helpful info.
- Keep on blogging. When the property market is in the state it is, it can get pretty hard to come up with material for blog posts. Well, I”ll just have to suck it up won’t I? As will you if you if you don’t want your blog to die an untimely death. 😉
- Keep on commenting. Blogging may be hard sometimes, but you can’t really suffer from ‘commenter’s block’. If you’ve been engaged by a post and read it to the end, then chances are you have an opinion about it. It doesn’t take 2 minutes to leave a comment.
Of course the best types of resolutions to make are the easy ones. Ya know, like giving up stuff you don’t actually do. So I’ll add to my list…
- Give up the crack habit, it doesn’t do the complexion any favors.
- Stop signing autographs in public, it’s just crass.
- Write less novels in Latin, not enough people were reading them anyway.
