This is the week for making New Year’s Resolutions.  Don’t worry if you haven’t made any yet- there’s no rule they have to be done on the first.  There’s also no rule about what they have to be about.  Personal resolutions might start with being healthier, greener, happier, etc.  All good goals to shoot for.

But what do you resolve this year for your business?  You can’t write resolutions for all your employees, nor would you want to.  But what do you hope for this year?  What would you like to see better?  Sure, more profit would be nice, but how do you get there?  Simply by saying you want it?  Unfortunately, no.

This year, why not make some specific resolutions for getting off to a better start?  Your New Year’s Resolution{s} mightl look a lot like a mission statement, but they should {hopefully} be a lot less cheesy and a whole lot more effective.  You might resolve to get better ergonomic equipment this year, or to retain repeat business through referrals, or to improve your online presence, or to cut down on work-related stress and/or injuries, or more productivity and less distraction for a better bottom line.  Even the process of thinking through what you want for the next year is beneficial because it makes you evaluate the last year in light of new goals.

It’s truly up to you and your specific business to decide what kind of resolutions to make.  Just take an hour or so to sit down and reflect on the past business year, jotting down the main ups and downs and work from there on what improvements you’d like to make.  However, you’re much more likely to achieve your goals if you focus on a few things that affect everyone, such as distraction, stress, and injuries.  By improving speech privacy or even alleviating work-related stress, everyone office-wide is more able to contribute to the goals and less likely to fritter away hours or call in sick.

There’s something refreshing about January 1st and the newness of a year.  Therefore, make sure you take the time to think through what you want for 2011.

January 1st is the beginning of many self-improvement schemes.

It’s a new year…a time that lends itself to new resolutions.  Here are 2010′s top ten resolutions (in no particular order):

• 1. Stop smoking
• 2. Get Fit
• 3. Lose Weight
• 4. Enjoy Life More
• 5. Quit Drinking
• 6. Get Organized
• 7. Learn Something New
• 8. Get Out of Debt
• 9. Spend more time with Family
• 10. Help Others

Interestingly, most new year’s resolutions aim in the self-improvement direction.  Who thinks to himself, “I’d like to be less productive and weigh more this year.  And, less time with friends and family would be great.”  I’m wagering no one.  I’d also bet that the average man or woman resolves very little about work productivity.  However, if said average person wants to get more out of life, get organized, and spend more time with family, it helps to have a game plan.  In fact, this site suggests:

Success is not an accident, it begins with a well-conceived plan. You can and will achieve more in the next year than you have in the past ten with a disciplined plan of action. By investing your efforts into a New Years Resolution, you give yourself a launch pad for starting your new year and your new life.

Resolutions at work

If you’d like to help others at work (#10), one idea is to enable them to work more productively and efficiently.  Distractions, namely conversational ones, are the number one production eaters.  One way to deal with them is to hunt down the chatty cathys and destroy them.  Or you might consider sound masking, akin to white noise in that it is the addition of low-level background sound that covers, or masks, intrusive, distracting noises.  The end result is more engaged workers…which leads to more productive and less stressed workers.  Win-win (or win-win-win as the great office manager Michael Scott would say) for everyone.