5 New Year’s Resolutions for the Office

Along with the new year come new resolutions, new goals, new expectations. Starting January 1st, we all have a list of things we want to accomplish and fulfill during the coming year; some of us keep track of them and how we’re doing, and some of us forget about them eventually.

Regardless of which group you fit into, here are 5 resolutions that we believe every worker should try their best to keep in order to make the work life more productive and more agreeable for everyone involved.

1. Declutter / Clean your Desk (or Workspace area) Every Month

All those piles of papers and folders aren’t going to disappear and get smaller by themselves. Although to some extent ‘I find order in my own mess’ is true, so much noise around your workspace creates distraction and might lead to you wanting to leave your space more often than not.

So, every two weeks or at least once a month, sit down and commit to cleaning your desk…throw out all papers and contracts that are no longer needed, make sure you don’t have food open lying around, organize your office supplies and cables. Your future self will thank you for it.

2. Delegate Tasks

With every leadership position comes the responsibility of delegating. We need to acknowledge that we aren’t capable of doing everything by ourselves, and that if we want to be efficient and the best, we need to collaborate and delegate tasks to everyone in the team. Granted, sometimes it works best if you take full charge of things, but sometimes it’s about a team effort, of realizing who is the best at doing what and constantly helping each other thrive and succeed.

3. Give Feedback (or Ask for It)

A few months ago, we shared an article that talked about the employee review process and why some believe that it’s time to make adjustments to it. Whether or not the time has come to make adjustments to it, keep in mind that feedback is necessary in order to keep improving and reaching the goals we’ve set out to accomplish.

Ask clients for feedback, ask supervisors and coworkers, but ask–and if you’re in a position in which you’re the one responsible to give feedback, make sure that you do.

4. Clean Out Your Inbox

Those 4,765 unread emails will soon turn into 8,972 if you don’t do anything about it. Establish one day and go through every single email in your inbox, delete the ones that need deleting, mark as junk the ones that are spam, reply to those that you need to…and create different labels (trust me, it helps, quite a lot).

You’ll be grateful the next day when you open up your inbox and the number has gone down to a two-digit 12 or 28 unread emails. You’ll breathe a breath of no stress and answering them won’t seem like such a terrible thing.

5. Give Back to Your Community

Last year we saw plenty of business centers and coworking spaces giving back to their communities. This year, we hope to see some more of this, not just at the end of the year, but year-round. You’re not only part of the community where you work, you’re also part of the extended community surrounding the area in which you work. So get involved, help out, get to know it. You’ll feel rewarded, they’ll be thankful, and you’ll start to associate more than just ‘job’ or ‘work’ with your workspace area.