The New Year’s Resolution Guide: Small Actions = Big Results

From our Friends at Lifted Fitness

Do you ever feel like there is so much information available to us that your brain starts to hurt? I think about this often when I’m at the grocery store staring at 78 different varieties of pasta sauce, 92 types of bread or 26 Ben & Jerry’s flavors. How about choosing which Netflix shows to watch or podcasts to listen to? The possibilities are endless in our day-to-day life. However, when it comes to increased productivity, think there’s one solution. It comes down to selecting one goal to create a ripple effect in your life.

In the book, “The One Thing” Gary Keller discusses the 80/20 principle—“a minority of causes, inputs, or effort usually leads to a majority of the results, outputs, or rewards.” In other words, the majority of what you want will come from the minority of what you do. In the discussion of choosing a single New Year’s resolution, ask yourself the following: What is the one thing I can do this year where 80 percent of my success will come from 20 percent of my effort? Here are a few examples:

Start every morning by making your bed. Sounds simple, but few actually do this. Why is it important? Because this little action will jump start your productivity juices and creates a domino effect for larger, more important actions throughout the day.

Your resolution: Start with 3 days a week and progress bi weekly to eventually daily. Just organize the sheets evenly. You don’t have to be able to bounce a quarter off of it.

No social media during the week. Yes, that’s right. Only on the weekends. OR if that’s an aggressive start, begin with social media ONLY while sitting on porcelain. Hopefully you don’t freak out enough to justify upping your beans intake!! Just think about the other productive tasks you could be completing instead.

Your resolution: No social media every Monday for week 1. Add a day every week until you get to the fifth day. If you have trouble with this, try deleting Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat etc. Monday through Friday. You can also change your phone to gray scale, which has been shown to significantly reduce phone usage. If you still find this challenging download The Moment app, which tracks how long you’ve been on your phone during the day and proceed to vomit.

Go to the gym in the morning. If you go to the gym in the morning you have to be in bed at a reasonable time which means you aren’t out drinking late, eating sloppy food, or damaging your bank account. Lastly, after your morning workout the donut or pile of French toast won’t be as appetizing.

Your resolution: Start with two mornings a week and progress by listening to your body. Your brain will also be firing on all cylinders so be prepared to solve how exactly a bitcoin works.

How do you hold yourself accountable to this one task? Simple. You either tell your friend you’ll give them $100 if you don’t adhere to your tasks by March or head to stickk.com, where your money will be donated to a charity if you fail. It hurts to lose money. Secondly, you write an X through each day completed on a paper calendar. Lastly, get your friends involved and hold each other accountable. People helping people is powerful stuff.

Honorable mention: 
-Stop watching the news. Terribly negative and everything that happens you’ll most likely hear about from others.
-Listening to podcasts or books on tape as opposed to the radio in the car. “Automobile University” is the best University.
-Limiting TV watching to 1 hour per day or 7-10 hours per week.
-Writing 5 days per week in a gratitude journal. Start with just one thing you are thankful for. Order the One Minute Gratitude journal. Cheap on Amazon.

Written by Mo Davidson – Co-owner of Lifted Fitness in South Boston, MA.