Are You Ready for 2024?

I don’t want to alarm you, but I felt it was my duty to remind you that 2024 is just 4 weeks away. 😀

Okay, may be a few days more than 4 weeks, but that’s all you have left for 2023.

What are you going to do in these last few weeks of the year? Here is what I suggest.

Revisit your 2023 goals NOW

Here’s what I’ll do: I’ll pull out my notebook containing goals for 2023, review what’s still pending, and then aim to complete whatever I can. I strongly advise you to do the same, whether your goals are written down or not. If you’ve ever set a goal for yourself, now is the perfect time to revisit them.

And remember that you still have four weeks to accomplish them, either fully or partially. For instance, I realised yesterday that I had completed just one week of a 6-weeks Psychology course I signed up for in October!

I rescheduled the deadlines and started. I could finish the 2nd week yesterday itself because turned out I had to watch just 3 more videos, which were hardly 15 minutes on the whole. I did the quiz and just like that Second week completed!

Trust me, it is more about mindset when it comes to starting, doing and completing tasks that are part of your goal.

Also, it feels much better when you’ve taken some baby steps towards achieving a goal. And why is that so, you ask? Well, it’s because…

Little things make a big impact

Those little tasks we do to complete the goal partially make us happy fully. I could write endlessly about happy hormones – dopamine, endorphins, oxytocin, and serotonin – and how they kick in whenever we experience a feeling of accomplishment, making us feel happy, stress-free, and successful.

But just one information should suffice. Dopamine is the reward chemical released by our brain when we complete any task, creating a feeling of motivation, satisfaction and productivity. Needless to add, these feelings egg you on to start on subsequent tasks lined up for the day or for accomplishing the goal.

These four lines from the 18th-century poem “Little Things” by Julia Carney and Brewer puts across the importance of taking baby steps so beautifully:

Little drops of water,

Little grains of sand,

Make the mighty ocean,

And the pleasant land.

Your ACTION STEP

Pick one goal you have been procrastinating on for a long time. List five baby steps you can take towards accomplishing it, and then do them. Or schedule them in your calendar.

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-Shweta, a freelance writer, explores tech’s impact on individuals, businesses, and society. Her work spans entrepreneurship, business, and productivity in Forbes, Newsweek, HuffPost, and Thomson Reuters.