Seven resolutions you can easily keep

The dawn of each year fills many of us with hope that we can become better versions of ourselves. To improve our health, work on our relationships, grow our finances, and maybe create greater impact on others.

Here’s a list of seven resolutions I’ve ‘stress-tested’ throughout last year, so I know that you will find them quite easy to keep. There’s much more that needs work, but think of these as ‘low-hanging fruit’ to substantively improve your life and the planet at the same time.

1.      Take a walk. It is clear that regular walking is almost the ‘ultimate exercise’ for all age groups. It helps to reduce weight, anxiety, depression, blood pressure, ‘bad’ cholesterol, resists memory loss, improves sleep quality, and builds heart and lung fitness as well as stronger bones. I find on solitary walks that it's perfect to practice mindfulness, or when walking with someone it's great for quality time. You’ve probably heard (or even recommended to others) of the magic number of walking 10,000 steps a day. This might have felt like a daunting goal to reach for most office jobs. You might even have grown discouraged counting steps in your fitness wearable, and wondered if you should even try at all. As it turns out, this 10,000 number is just an arbitrary goal introduced by a Japanese company marketing a pedometer back in 1964! The good news is that the science says that we only really need to walk just 4,400 steps a day to gain the benefits above, which level off when we reach 7,500 steps. This translates into about 3.5 – 6 km. You only need to be a little deliberate about taking a walk rather than drive to pick up your lunch, alight a station before your actual stop, or take the stairs instead of the lift. As a bonus, hitting the pavement helps to reduce your carbon footprint!

2.      Go digital. Ever since our office shifted to the cloud for data security purposes, we have reaped great productivity benefits from being able to simultaneously work on the same document. On the personal front, I would take copious notes during my meetings, yet struggled to retrieve the notes from my ever-growing pile of journals. Tablet technology has improved so much that the tactile experience of scribing seamlessly matches that of writing on paper. Since I shifted over to using a tablet, I have probably saved hours of thumbing through pages to find the right notes, can share my digital scribblings instantly with colleagues, and saved a bundle on printing and paper costs at our office.

3.      Online meetings. I find that there’s still no substituting an actual in-person meeting, whether it is to truly be present with a client, or to build team spirit. In Singapore’s context at this time of writing, we can now hold meetings of up to eight people, but at the same time many of us have also gotten used to avoiding the morning commute. I am finding that with tools like Zoom and Miro, being deliberate about checking in with each other in smaller groups, being selective in deciding which meetings demand in-person time, as well as clustering in person meetings on the same day, we might be able to trim our weekly commute by 30 – 50 percent on a sustainable basis. By being strategic about your commute, you will be able to find the right balance to improve your productivity, life quality, relationships, while reducing energy and carbon emissions. (By the way, you can combine resolutions too, such as by inviting a colleague to take a walk with you while you catch up!)

4.      Cut plastics. The last two years have seen many countries and companies stepping up to reduce or even ban single-use plastics. Awareness has grown, but there’s so much more that we can do behaviourally on the demand-side. I stock a food container at the office and at home, which I bring with me to take out food rather than risk ingesting harmful toxins from polystyrene boxes. (Pro tip: It’s much easier to clean to oil off glass containers!) I carry a water bottle around, which helps save money and cuts my intake of refined sugar. I find that local shops like NTUC, Breadtalk, or McDonald’s like to double bag food items, and I will refuse the bags when I can.

5.      Separate my trash. Countries such as Korea, Japan, or Taiwan with strong recycling ecosystems have up to eight different colours of recycling bins for different types of trash. It is taking some time for us to reach there, and one way that as consumers we can really accelerate this is to clean and separate our trash. After a house party, just rinse our glass bottles and make sure that our newspapers for example, doesn’t have food on it so it doesn’t spoil the whole collection.

6.      Reduce air-con. Yes, I love my air-conditioning too, and one easy tweak is to just adjust the thermostat to 23 – 25 degrees Celsius, rather than bring it down to 20 degrees and hide under a thick comforter! Using the timer on your air-con so it switches off when its already cold in the the night. A fan also helps.

7.      Eat less. After watching Gamechangers on Netflix, I went on a vegan diet and lost 5 kg within a couple of months. Those of you who know me well will know that this was not at all easy for me! As it turns out, the science is not 100 percent there, so after a few months of habit formation I just have low- or no-meat as my ‘default setting’ as much as I can, and have also been trying out intermittent fasting. I haven’t been fully rigorous about A/B testing for results here, but the weight loss has sustained, I find that my run times are a little better, my strength has improved, and this is hopefully reducing my part of cattle methane emissions.

As a bonus for coming to the end of this long article, the latest thing I am trying is Cold Showers. Cold showers are good for your circulation, immunity, skin, hair, mood, and physical recovery, but I have been ‘spoilt’ with warm showers for the past three decades, and this was something I never thought I could wean myself off. Sometime last year, I was finding myself ‘getting soft’ in my daily comforts, and in a bid to restock my mental reserve for other things I wanted to accomplish in life, I decided to start by just going ‘cold turkey’ on hot water. It’s certainly still a jolt every morning, but I am happy that it’s stuck for some months now, and I am glad that change is still possible even at this age! Water heaters are the second-highest source of energy usage in the home, so this is helping to cut my utility bills too.

Hope you enjoyed this list! It was fun for me to write, but my sharing will only be useful when you put any of these into practice. We see 2021 as the year of Sustainable Transformation, and what better place is there to get started with than in our own lives and for our own personal benefit? Hope that you will join me in keeping this up! Do let me know what other resolutions have you been able to keep, or are now considering?