Hello everyone, I want to talk about New Year Resolutions today. Yes, it is not a new year celebration time. But every day is the first day for the rest of your life. And there is a reason why I bring it up today. But before that, I want you to watch this Youtube Video.

The reason I bring this up today is because I want to share with you one of my tips to increase productivity. It is, as you may guess, to have resolutions. Not just new year resolutions, but resolutions for every month, week, or day. The reason is the same as for why I advocate people to have New Year resolutions. It clarifies your goals, your purpose, and helps you stay on track to achieve them. For example, I have hit most of the milestones that I have declared as my resolutions in that New Year resolution video. I swim better and faster than I used to, I play the piano better than I used to, and I am more conscious of my health. There were also some professional goals that I had set for myself, which I didn’t share in that video, and I have achieved those as well.

Thus, I believe setting up goals is an important technique to clarify to yourself what’s most important to you, and to derive the motivation to make those things happen. Think of it like having a pedometer to count your steps. You could walk more without the pedometer, but if you set up a goal to hit 10,000 steps everyday, you will derive a little more motivation to walk than you’d without tracking your steps.

And because New Year arrives only once a year (well, for us Nepalese, we get twice a year), it is important to set goals more frequently without waiting for the New Year. You can set up goals for your life on a daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis. Publicly traded companies report their performances on a quarterly and annual basis, and share their performance against their guidance (goals or expectations). You can think of your own performance in a similar way.

Just to give you an inside peek into my daily life (with the hope that this may offer you some practical tips on how to implement this in your daily life), below is a list of some goals/philosophies/way of living that I have been working on assimilating into my lifestyle recently (yes, it’s important to write things down so that you will have an objective benchmark to compare your future performance against your goals) –