Happy New Quarter; here are three better ways to spend your time than writing resolutions.

It's the gap between Christmas and New Year and, if your mind has turned to work, you may well be thinking about New Years Resolutions, Goals or Priorities for 2017. Can you even remember what your 2016 resolutions were let alone whether you achieved them.

Here are three relatively simple things that you can do instead of writing soon to be forgotten resolutions to help set up a great 2017.

ONE: Stop thinking in Years... and start thinking in quarters

Just because a year is deeply ingrained in us as the time taken for the earth to orbit the sun, that just makes it perfect for understanding the seasons, it is not at all great for business and personal planning. A year is too long to help us to define our actions right now and, it by the time we realise that we need to act to reach an annual goal, its usually too late to influence the outcome.

As an alternative, stop thinking in years and start thinking in Quarters. What can you realistically achieve by the end of March? Breaking a quarterly goal down into weekly actions becomes far more practical to get your head around than deciding what actions to take each week for an annual goal. You can even plan a small break or treat at the end of each quarter to take you into the new one.

TWO: Focus on productivity... and, if it helps, start a bullet journal

We get 80% of our most productive work done in just 20% of our working time. If you are not familiar with the Pareto principle in business, this article might be of interest... What is making so much of our time so unproductive? One thing is the revolution in digital working which has given us incredible opportunities and which, for many of us, has been at a huge cost to our ability to work in a focussed way for a long period of time. People tend to hop from task to task, not completing anything without stopping to check email notifications and reply to one of the every growing types of messages that reach us every waking minute. Despite best efforts, I have been interrupted three times between starting this article and publishing it.

If you want to get more out of your time, plan your time better and remove distractions while you are supposed to be doing something else. If you struggle with setting time for tasks and priorities, try spending 10 minutes a day keeping a Bullet Journal https://www.thelazygeniuscollective.com/blog/how-to-bullet-journal This is a simple (old-fashioned?) way to plan your time and tasks to suit your work and lifestyle.

THREE: Set your goals... and, more importantly, share them.

You can read hundreds of better articles on goal setting than this one. If you aren't setting goals then start, it actually works. If you don't know where to start in setting and achieving goals, read (or listen to) this book...

Once you have set a realistic, definable, time limited goal then do one very simple thing - Share it... That might be with colleagues, family, a mentor or a close friend. Whoever it is, the act of sharing your goal changes it fundamentally and, hugely increases the chances that you will stick with actions that will make help to make your goal happen.

Thanks for reading and, of course, may I take this opportunity to wish everyone a Happy New Quarter when it comes...