I know it’s already the 11th of January – but HAPPY NEW YEAR, anyway! haha
You probably heard that a few times already. 😉
Despite closing in on two weeks into the new year, 2022 is still a newborn baby, and there’s a lot to look forward to – you still have plenty of time to influence, mold, and shape this new year into something enjoyable and exciting.
That’s why I thought I’d share with you a little exercise I did last week – this one is different than the usual “New Year’s Resolutions” you see everywhere, blah blah blah.
Past Year Review
You can do this new year planning hack in 30 minutes. I learned this from Tim Ferris (the 4 Hour Work Week dude.)
Here is what you do:
- Grab a notepad and create two columns: POSITIVE and NEGATIVE.
- Go through your calendar from the last year, looking at every week.
- For each week, jot down on the pad any people or activities or commitments that triggered peak positive or negative emotions for that month. Put them in their respective columns.
- Once you’ve gone through the past year, look at your notepad list and ask, “What 20% of each column produced the most reliable or powerful peaks?”
- Based on the answers, take your “positive” leaders and schedule more of them in the new year. Get them on the calendar now! Book things with friends and prepay for activities/events/commitments that you know work. It’s not real until it’s on the calendar. That’s step one. Step two is to take your “negative” leaders, put “NOT-TO-DO LIST” at the top, and put them somewhere you can see them each morning for the first few weeks of 2022. These are the people and things you *know* make you miserable, so don’t put them on your calendar out of obligation, guilt, FOMO, or other nonsense.
That’s it!
A bonus I discovered while doing this exercise involves GRATITUDE. I found myself flexing my gratitude muscles as I reviewed my 2021 and recalled several things I experienced that induced some warm feelings of gratitude in my heart.
This technique also helped me clarify a few people and things that I need not give time to this new year.
Let me know if you do this exercise and how it goes.
Cheers to 2022,
Matthew
