End of Year Productivity Tips

Get a jump on 2023. Follow these December productivity techniques to wrap up the business year and be ready to roll in 2023. Most of these tasks will individually take less than twenty minutes. So invest the time and get set up to be a more productive you in 2023.

• Clear out your desk drawer
• Wipe down your bookshelves in the office
• Purge any unneeded reference material, seminar binders. 
• Update your credentials to reflect the year
• Update your contact management system with new contact information or changed addresses
• Clear unused files and folders off your computer desktop 

This is Transition Your Life's Best of Post. I started this blog in August of 2007 with the goal to write about transition and change. I also started a second blog in 2009 - Terry's Thinking which is designed for coaches, professional organizers and consultants.

Should and Could's - let's think about this!

Are you failing to listen to the should and the could's in your life? By transforming our shoulds into "do's" and "will"s we may accomplish many things.  However, sometimes our should and coulds are things we might want to avoid doing entirely.

1. Take a look at your should's and could's 

Spend some time over the next few days listening to your inner talk and your external communications. Take note of the number of times you express or think the word "Should" or "Could". If you have a high frequency of shoulds or coulds, (Perhaps 5+ a day) you may want to spend some "thinking, development and planning" time around them.


2. Delve into the should's and could's

After you have listened to yourself over the last few days, you may find some frequent shoulds and coulds. Take time to jot them down in sentence form.

I should get more sleep at night
I wish I could keep my desk clear
We could buy a new car 



3. Analyze your should and could's for future work and change.

Let's say you want to get more sleep. How can you go about making it come to fruition? By brainstorming you may come to some possilble solutions.

For example:  

I should get more sleep -  To get more sleep, go to bed earlier or stay in bed longer. The should becomes a will when you decide to go to sleep earlier or set your alarm for a later morning wake up.

We could buy a new car - Deciding to buy a new or different car, is a process and project. You may choose to get a new car when your current car reaches a certain mileage, or if maintenance fees exceed the cost of a monthly payment. Your new car might be more advantageous when you have to start driving to your new company's office (which is further away) to keep fuel costs down. A new car might make more sense after you have paid off other debts or saved a certain dollar amount. The could becomes more of a strategy and plan development when you look at the when and why components. 


4. Transform your should and could's to wills, when's, why's or later decisions. If you formalize and bring these shoulds and coulds  to the next phase you will allow more space for things to happen.

5. Erase your negative should and could's from your mental and verbal vocabulary.  Sometimes we have stuck should and could's which can not be easily transformed into action or do not warrant further thought about. 

For Example:

I should have said  ..... instead of ......
I could have read the directions three times and caught my mistake (after improperly assembling a complex piece of furniture)


Spend some time working on your should and could's and you will likely transform your life.


This is a best of post from 2009.

Measuring Your Progress

There are times when you need to measure your progress on your journey. You can do this at certain points of times during every transition. Here are some suggested time and then some questions for you to ask yourself.  The potential times to do this are:


Four months after a move
Two months after graduating college
Three months into a new job
Two months after retiring
One year after the loss of a loved one
Six months after getting married


What has been accomplished? 

What is there left to do? 

What has been learned? 

How have you changed?

How are things different than you expected?

What do you know now that you did not know then about yourself? (Example: You are skilled in packing fragile items)


Reviewing and reflecting can help you get a fresh perspective and grasp of where you are and what you have accomplished. I encourage you to take some time to size things up. It can be revitalizing and give you some more energy to move forward.