The end of the year is not just the time to make New Year resolutions; it is also an appropriate time to take into account what work for you and didn’t work for you in 2023. All of us are likely to have some regrets about all that we couldn’t do and accomplish this year. But the great thing about a new year is a renewed opportunity to make amends, make changes and start afresh.
However, change is painful and breaking bad habits can be tough. However, instead of making big changes, going for the smallest of the changes in the way we eat, work, sleep and spend our time can positively impact on our lives. For instance, atomic habits are small positive, sustainable changes in our routine that ensure personal growth, productivity and improvement in the quality of our life.  

Get Enough Sleep

When we have a lot going on in our lives then the first casualty for most people is usually sleep. Firstly, we try to gain more time for our important projects by cutting back on sleep and rest. Secondly, our preoccupations and worries associated with the process and outcomes of a project or an issue can mess up the quality of our sleep.   

Moreover, there would be work, social engagements, TV series to binge on, books to read and the inevitable late night snacking.  Life seems too hectic, but also too exciting, to go to bed early.

Still, on an average, our bodies need 8 hours of sleep. And it’s just not the hours but the quality of our sleep matters too. However, the problem with sleep is that most of us feel that we can do fairly well with far lesser sleep than the recommended hours.

However, our mood, focus, mental clarity and the performance and the quality of our work improve significantly when we are well rested. Also, sleeping early means being able to get up early, start work earlier and consequently get more done, without less pressure.

Don’t Grab that Coffee Right Away…

Most of us are used to certain routines and rituals. We get up and feel that we need the kick of caffeine right away to become fully awake and alert. However, caffeine increases cortisol levels, as well as the production of stomach acid, thus making us feel more anxious than awake. Moreover, the cortisol levels raised unnaturally by caffeine in the morning would dip much earlier during the day, thus leaving you feel lethargic and in the need for another caffeine fix.

One the other hand, you would discover how much more awake and alert you would feel if you choose to start your day by having a glass of water instead and exercising or going out for a morning walk. Furthermore, low to moderate impact physical activity would also help in maintaining our cortisol levels throughout the day.

So, the best time to drink coffee is two to three hours after your breakfast, just after you start work, midday, or whenever there is a dip in your cortisol and energy levels.

Make Your To-Do List Realistic  

When having to deal with a gazillion things, it’s likely to lose sight of your day or focus on things that aren’t even important in the first place. That’s why a to-do lists help. Not only you can list down all the things you need to do in a given day or week, but you are also able to prioritize tasks through them.

To-do lists tend to work well for most of us. However, they need to be more realistic than ambitious. Most of us are in the habit of cramming our to-do list with a lot more than we can realistically do in a day. Over ambitious and unrealistic to-do lists don’t work, but they also cause us considerable stress and demotivation when we fail to execute them successfully.

So, it’s OK to have a small but focused and functional list. Even if you are able to get three important tasks in a day, done with focus whole heartedness and without undergoing extreme stress, it’s worthwhile.

Create Buffers

Sometimes, the things we are doing end up taking a little bit more time than what we had foreseen.  Likewise, we end up encountering small emergencies which need us to improvise our plans. Similarly, our minds and bodies are not designed to function for a longer stretch of time, without taking any breaks in between.

Therefore, we need small pockets of down time to replenish our mental and physical energies and to regain our focus. But when we are planning our day, we do so in a hyper focused, idealistic, but also in a very rigid way. This means that we usually don’t build small buffers and gaps to accommodate unforeseen issues, emergencies, adjustments and breaks. That’s why whenever there are slight disturbances in our routine and kinks in our plans, instead of navigating our way through them anyways, we end up getting frustrated and overwhelmed. Subsequently, the efforts to get back on the track and salvage the original plan can be exhausting and demotivating.

Hence, tiny buffers in our plans help us not only tweak our plans according to unforeseen circumstances but also allow our mind and body to rest and recover. Likewise, buffer time between meetings and projects help us give ourselves a mental break, regain our focus and plan and strategize our future moves.

Give the Screens a Break

Electronic gadgets, particularly smartphones, tablets, and computers, have penetrated all the aspects of our lives. They are the first thing we see in the morning and the last thing we look at before going to bed. In between, we spend all our times looking at our gadgets for the purpose of work, entertainment as well as distraction.

Screens give our mind constant dopamine hits, thus leading to pleasure, a sense of instant gratification and reward. However, the excessive or compulsive screen use, especially in the context of social media or gaming, has sizable negative consequences, such as giving rise to addictive behavior, impatience and adverse effects on mental health.

Thus, small steps such as switching off your smartphone at night, putting it on aero plane mode, keeping it out of reach while you are doing important work, choosing to walk, exercise, meditate or read in your leisure hours instead of browsing your phone can improve your focus and productivity also also positively impact your mental and physical health.

To Sum Up

Every new year is the best time to make positive changes in your routine and habits to improve the quality of your work and life. But our new year resolutions and goals usually are unsuccessful because we fail to set in place the routines and structures to support them. Even the smallest of positive tweaks in how we spend our days can have a formative and far-reaching impact on our health, productivity and quality of life. Atomic habits are thus small but transformative.  It is not too late to adopt a few atomic habits now to set the theme for a successful 2024.