6 New Year’s Resolutions For Professionals In The Workplace

New Year’s resolutions are notorious for going nowhere. Only about eight percent of people who set New Year’s resolutions actually accomplish them. A huge reason for this is that most professionals are overly ambitious with their goals. You can’t expect yourself to just immediately change just because of an arbitrary promise to yourself during a New Year’s party. If you really want to improve your productivity and working relationships, consider things like lowering your debt and these five other achievable goals at work.

Eat Less Refined Sugar

You’ve probably heard countless times that consuming refined sugar is bad for your health. But you might not realize just how many ways having too much of the stuff can seriously detriment your productivity at work in the short term or long term. Of course, your diet can affect productivity at work.

Firstly, less sugar will give you enduring energy throughout the work day. Rather than crashing towards 4 PM, you can continue to be productive in your workplace on a daily basis. By switching to frozen yogurt rather than ice cream at lunch, you can have a much better afternoon. In the long term, eating and drinking too much refined sugar can lead to issues such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and acne. It also impacts your mental state—increasing your likelihood for depression. You can find sugar in almost all processed foods—even in ones where you wouldn’t at all expect it. This makes it difficult to avoid the stuff. However, it also makes it easier to cut it out of your diet. Reducing your sugar intake is an achievable goal that will provide immediate benefit to your life.

Drink More Water

Your body is mostly water. Due to this, you need to be continually replenishing your supply of this life-supporting substance. Past assertions that you need to be drinking eight glasses of water every day are possibly overblown. However, keeping yourself adequately hydrated is going provide holistic benefits to your ability to think and perform.

Just like managing your sugar intake, drinking more water can help you stay alert and productive at work. If you have become too reliant on coffee at work, water can balance things out. If cutting down on coffee has been one of your New Year’s resolutions in years past—try approaching it this way. And the best part is that it doesn’t cost you much time or money to drink more water.

Reduce Your Debt

No one wants to be in debt. But even more, no one in debt wants to think about being in debt. Ignoring your debt issues, however, isn’t going to make them go away. It will only make them worse. People with credit card debt or other high-interest loans especially need to consider ways to pay down these outstanding balances.

Try to pay down your highest interest debt first, as this will save you a lot of money in the long run. You should also create a budget for yourself if you haven’t already done this. Budgeting your money will help you stay totally on top of your spending habits. If you’re really struggling with your debt, companies such as Freedom Debt Relief exist for the sole purpose of helping people regain control of their financial situation.

Use All Your Vacation Time

Americans work far more than people in other developed countries. In fact, the United States doesn’t have any statutory minimum for paid vacation days. Even Japan, a nation notorious for its hardcore worth ethic, guarantees 10 days of annual leave and 15 holidays for no experience jobs. That is a total of 15 more days than the minimum in the U.S.

So, if you’re lucky enough to have vacation days, you need to take advantage of them. Taking time off is essential to your restorative process. Don’t be afraid to use the time granted to you by your job.

Ask For Help At Work

Many working professionals inherently associate asking for help with failure. But no one is capable of doing everything on their own. If this were the case, society as we know it wouldn’t need to exist. Your success at work is tied to your team. Accepting that you need help is actually a sign of you taking initiative. Identifying your own shortcomings, and acting to do something about them, is a habit of highly successful people in the workplace.

Give That Long-Overdue Apology

Just like asking for help, apologizing is something that should be extremely simple in theory. Yet, corporate professionals struggle to do this simple thing. Whether it’s for something big or small, apologizing is beneficial for all involved parties at the office. You don’t want to have the guilt of an unfulfilled apology hanging over your head. There is time and place to apologize at work. However, the sooner you apologize, the better your year will be. And the coworker or colleague who deserves that apology should get that closure. Sincerely saying you’re sorry to one person every year is something that should be on everyone’s list of resolutions.

Don’t set yourself up for failure if you’ve failed to achieve your New Year’s goals in the past. Creating realistic resolutions for work is the best way to actually accomplish things. Once you gain some momentum, you might then be able to tackle bigger things at work and in your career.

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