With the New Year fast approaching, we all start thinking about how we can improve our lives in the coming year. We mostly all want to be healthier, smarter, richer, and perhaps more helpful to others. Not only is it important to lay out your resolutions and their potential impact on your life, but you’ve also got to find a way to keep them. Most guides suggest you need to set specific and manageable goals, mentally prepare yourself for change or hurdles, and be sure it’s something that motivates you. If you’re having trouble coming up with goals that could improve your life, here are 5 you should always include:
Out with the Old in with the New
Get rid of old habits. Before diving head-first into your New Year’s resolution, it is important to take a step back and see what is it you’re doing wrong.
What do you find that people are constantly commenting on? If you’ve noticed a recurring trend in people’s response to your behavior, that may be something you need to change.
The first breakthrough in improvement is taking a personal inventory. Whether you want to save money or accomplish particular tasks, it’s important you take a moment to look back at your past actions and see what worked and what didn’t.
Resolve to be Better Organized
Being that it’s the end of one year and the beginning of the next, it’s the perfect time to take stock of the past year’s accomplishments. What did you want to accomplish this last year? And what steps did you take to achieve this?
Monitoring one’s own progress is essential. Taking account of what was and wasn’t completed, boils down to keeping track of tasks and motivating yourself to complete them, even the menial ones. Your resolution may naturally focus on the things you didn’t do in the last year. Organizing yourself to make a gradual change can greatly affect your ability to keep your resolutions. Physically write down your goals, keep it visible, and mark each off as they get accomplished but allow a little room for error.
Learn Something New
You want to keep your new year’s resolution upbeat. Better yourself in a way you can benefit from, some resolve to improve their health or fitness but learning a new talent allows you to progress in your life. Whether it is career related, like learning a new programming language for that position you see yourself in, or something personal, like learning a spoken language to prepare for a trip overseas.
Challenge yourself to learn something you are motivated to stick to because you see the use in it.
Give More
Be the change you want to see in the world.
It’s important to have a positive impact on the world around you; whether it’s your environment, people less fortunate, animals in need or the earth itself.
The United Nations laid out 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) it believes would improve the conditions on earth and allow us to prosper as we move forward. These include reducing those who live in poverty by 50%, providing the world with affordable clean energy, and ensuring everyone on earth is receiving a quality education and medical treatment, among many others.
Give to organizations advancing these goals and play a part in making the world around you a better place.
Save More
Everyone wants to have more money but the reality is you spend to much, we all do. We spend on things we probably don’t need and provide us with very little. Saving money requires a certain level of consciousness in spending. A conservative amount to save of your monthly income is 10–15% according to the Teacher Insurance and Annuity Association of America. Resolving this would require you to be more conscious of your spending, in turn allowing you to put unnecessarily spent money to better use.
The tricky bit is how you can simultaneously save money and give it away to help those in need.
Where Givv Comes In
Givv lets you support the non-profits and causes you care about deeply, without ever coming out of pocket. Givv allows its users to simply donate idle computing capacity, which it then markets to consumers of cloud computing power and directs all the revenues to the non-profits the user supports. Givv allows you to both put more money in your savings and give to causes bigger than yourself. Selecting from a numerous amount of charity who have made it their resolution to advance the SDGs.