10 Tips to Be Your Best in 2020

Like most people, it is likely that you desire to improve and do better each year. With 2020 having just started, you desire to be your best in every area of life – personally, professionally, financially and relationship-wise – in the new year.

While being your best is specific to each individual, there are steps that anyone could take to help them improve their productivity and increase the likelihood of achieving their goals for the year. These steps include the following: 

1. Make a Habit of Waking Up Early

If you can manage to cultivate the habit of waking up early, you will give yourself a huge leverage in the quest to achieve all your goals. Besides affording you more hours to work with, waking up early will give you more energy than waking up later. More so, your brain will be more alert which will translate into better decisions.  

2. Always Seek to Increase Your Knowledge and Skills

If you want to be your best and achieve more in 2020, you must be determined to continually improve yourself. This means that you should continually seek to update your knowledge and skills. Take an online course; attend a seminar or a workshop; read every day. Read books in your field and other relevant fields. Doing these things will give you an edge over the average person and help you move ahead faster.    

3. Have Clear, Written Down Goals for the Year

A powerful force for achieving your goals is to write them down in a clear, well-defined manner. This principle works because writing down your goals forces you to get real clear about what it is that you want to accomplish. It also motivates you to want to do whatever is necessary to achieve what you have written down.

4. Always Work From a To-Do List

Several successful people have admitted that one of the key factors that have helped them to achieve so much is that they always work from a to-do list. Each morning, they itemize the things they want to accomplish in order of priority. As the day progresses, they tick them off as the work through them. At the end of the day, whatever they were not able to get done is moved to the next day. Then they start the following day with a new list of things to do in order of priority.

5. Always Eat the Biggest Frog First (Do Hard Things First)

As humans, we have a natural tendency to continually postponed doing those things that are hard, daunting or unpleasant. But if you are going to be your best in 2020, you will have to learn the habit of completing those tasks that are daunting before the smaller, less daunting ones. On the contrary, by getting the daunting task out of the way early on, you will become motivated and energised to take on the smaller ones because they are not as hard as the one you have completed.    

6. Leverage Other People’s Skills

To be your best in 2020, you must learn to use other people’s skills and competencies. No matter how much you know or how much skills you possess, you cannot do everything. You will be better off leveraging other people’s skills. When you outsource or delegate stuff that is not your strong suit to people whose capabilities suit those tasks, you give yourself the latitude to focus on those things that you do well. When you bring everything together in the end, you get way better result on your efforts

7. Be Resilient; Approach Everything With a Positive Mind-Set

To achieve anything worthwhile you are going to have to learn to stick with whatever you start until you have hit the finish line. You will encounter obstacles and unexpected setbacks as you pursue your goals. The key to winning is to never quit. You have to maintain a positive mind-set by always believing that things will eventually work out. Make a commitment to stay positive through all situations, including when it seems as if everything has gone to haywire. With a positive mind-set, you will stay resilient until you hit your mark.    

8. Make a Habit of Celebrating Small Wins

When you are driven individual with very tall aspirations, you tend to focus on the big picture totally ignoring the small accomplishments that you attain on the way to achieving your big goal. Presently, it’s been proven that this is a big mistake. Celebrating your small achievements boost your confidence and helps to keep you motivated for the long haul. Every small triumph you celebrate activates the reward circuitry of the brain, triggering the release of ‘feel good’ hormones such as dopamine which causes a feeling of accomplishment and pride to wash over you. Thus, you are motivated to keep going until you ultimately achieve your big goal.

9. Avoid Spending Too Much Time on Social Media

Social media is very useful both in our personal lives and for business but it can also be a huge source of distraction if our usage of it is not regulated. If you realize that social media is eating up a lot of your valuable time, make conscious efforts to cut down on your usage. One way to do this is to make a decision to check social media only during break hour and after the close of work. To ensure that you are not tempted to check through your phone, mute all notifications so that you will not hear the phone ping when a message comes in.

10. From Time to Time, Block Out Time to Rest and Rejuvenate

The most productive people set aside time, every now and then to relax, recharge their batteries and launch out again. This way, they steadily maintain their focus and are never worn out. Go out to the cinemas on a Friday evening; treat yourself to a night out on a Saturday and if you can spare the resources, take time off and retreat to some exotic place over a weekend just to be by yourself.   

Tervel T Kejih is the Lead Ghostwriter at Rhibbon Nation, a Lagos-based ghostwriting and content writing company that write books, autobiographies, articles, business plans and website content e.t.c. for individuals and businesses. To contact him to write your book, autobiography or other content, send an email to:[email protected]