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.