A 2020 Vision

The new year has arrived. Maybe you already feel like you’re behind. Each January 1st is an opportunity to try something new, get rid of something that isn’t working, recommit to your why, and generally attack anything you are doing with more energy and verve. But so is every quarter, every month, every week and every day. The pressure we can put on ourselves with the flip of the calendar page can be excessive or even damaging to our progress. Here are five ways to use the power of the new year while preserving some of your enthusiasm for the rest of it:

1. Use the new year as impetus to look back. What worked? What didn’t? What would have worked if you’d been more consistent or worked harder? Why didn’t you do that? Maybe you deserve some self-flagellation, but it is more likely that you tried to get more done than was humanly possible. (If there were extenuating circumstances, then this is most certainly true.) Or maybe what you set out to do isn’t really what you like doing. If you were giving someone else advice about this, what would you say to them? In 99.99% of cases, you would be more helpful and encouraging to them than you would be to yourself, so stop wallowing and review 2019 objectively. For a few hours, tops. Then move on.
2. Make a Do More list. The things that you did, that you liked doing, that worked – plan to do more of these things. If you can, assign a quantity that would be More. Whatever you did to create, or connect, or capitalize, ramp it up. But not insanely. Not 300x. Maybe not even 3x. Tech startups which are “gazelles” grow revenue by 20% per year, and that is considered outstanding. Aim for optimistic goals, tempered by reality. 
3. Make a Do Less list. Pay attention to those bruises on your forehead from the past year. Did you waste time attending too many “Earn $3 K per day effortlessly within 90 days” webinars? Did you spend hours taking course after course, or listening to podcast after podcast, without taking action? Maybe you had too much fun thinking of new ventures that would be more exciting, more foolproof, more lucrative than what you are doing now? If you are creative and have a good imagination, you can easily put yourself into a state where you feel like you have already achieved what you are reading about, learning about, or hearing. You know how it’s done, you can imagine having done it, and you bypass the fact that you actually need to do it yourself. Your forehead-slapper moments are probably different from mine, but these are my top three.
4. Keep an I Said No To list. Every time you say No to something, that saves more time and energy for your Do More items. It is hard to say No. Keep track of these little victories. 
5. Follow your stats, but not too much. It can be fun to track site visits, book sales, email opens, and the like. But don’t get hung up on week-by-week variations, especially if your numbers are small. Keep focused on the activities that drive these numbers instead. Sharing content to groups and forums, guest-posting, and being interviewed on a podcast will help to increase web traffic, for example. 

Keep your three lists handy, and revisit them each month and each quarter. Recommit to your Do More items, or replace them with new ones as needed, but realize that the incubation period for success is longer than you think. Don’t give up too soon. Starting all over again will likely mean that it will take even longer before you feel like you’ve “arrived,” however you define it.