At the start of the year, I was amused by the glut of stories in the media about New Year’s resolutions: Not just segments on the big ones (like dieting, dating, working out, and losing weight), but also segments on how people could improve their success with achieving their New Year’s resolutions. A segment on healthier eating reminded me that there are many small things you can do (not grand gestures) that replace unhealthy behaviors with healthy ones. For example, you can use artificial sweetener instead of real sugar to preserve your teeth. These little behavior changes are billed as increasing our life expectancy.
Increasing your lifespan may not be as easy to visualize as “staying young”. It might not be as strong a motivator for changing behaviors. But in the hierarchy of Good Ideas, longevity has its place.
There are many marketing and operational activities you might want to take on this year that are Good Ideas in the abstract. But before you implement one of them, you should be sure how it will serve your company or your customers.
I’m working on a client project that will bring a Good Idea out of the abstract, and into the realm of the achievable. With this client, I’ve made them clear of the benefits of this Good Idea to begin with. I’m establishing healthy habits for the organization to perform it, and making these habits into an efficient and painless routine.
We know that there is no lifetime employment anymore. But adopting healthy habits at work can keep things stable and moving in the right career direction for you. You can make yourself more valuable to your employers by delivering more results with the resources you have. You can improve your situation by producing results in the shortest amount of time. And you might be able to accomplish this with a couple of small gestures or behavior changes. This could mean just getting your ideas and resources organized, or getting them all together in the same space. It could also mean getting clear about why you are doing something, why you’re not doing it well, or, in some cases, why you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.
You can do this for yourself whether you are a design industry professional, in a job search, or a marketing professional, principal, or business owner. What Good Ideas would you like to accomplish that we can help you put into practice? Let us know!