Happy New Year! And, of course, happy new decade. At this time of year, many people make new year’s resolutions. This tradition is thought to date back at least to the Romans, whose god Janus had two faces so he could look to the future and the past at the same time. The Romans, apparently, would offer sacrifices to Janus and make pledges of good behavior for the upcoming year.
These days, we don’t make the sacrifices but we do make the pledges, or at least about 40% of Americans do. However, the statistics for the number of people who manage to follow through on those pledges make for some grim reading. According to U.S. News, 80% of resolution makers will fail by February 1st.
As for the things we’re promising to do, unsurprisingly they center on health and fitness. 59% of people say they will exercise more, 54% promise to eat more healthily, 48% pledge to lose weight. Curiously, only 8% of people want to drink less alcohol, and even more weirdly 1% of people don’t know what their resolutions are!
So what’s the secret to making your resolutions stick? One key, according to the American Psychological Association, is to start small, setting realistic goals that are easily achievable. And, focus on one thing at a time. Having too many goals or setting overly ambitious targets is a recipe for failure, they say.
Almost all of the most common resolutions that people make are focused on life outside of work, as you might expect. In fact, pretty much the only work-related resolution (other than “get a better job” (22%)) is “spend less time focused on work,” a resolution made by 7% of people.
But there are some things that we could resolve to change at work, that would even help with our personal goals (“reduce stress” (38%)).
We’ve written before about cleaning up your technical debt - going back and fixing up those corners that you cut when timeliness of delivery won out over code quality. (That was back in Lent, another time of the year when we humans like to pontificate about how we could be better people!) So a good resolution for the new year and the new decade might be to spend more time doing things right the first time, rather than fudging it now and promising yourself you’ll come back and fix things up later.
Another great place to start is to look at your build process. Investing a relatively small amount of time now in defining and automating the steps you take each time you make a new version of a given application can pay huge dividends down the road. It’s amazing how many Notes/Domino applications are assembled “by hand” each time a new version is created with plenty of scope for human error in the process.
If there’s no obvious place to improve, perhaps think about just reviewing how you do your day-to-day work. Deep down, we all know the best practices that we should bring to our professional lives every day, but sometimes it’s helpful to just take a step back and review what they are and whether we are applying them. If there’s just one thing you could do better in your daily work, what would it be? Perhaps that would make a good resolution.
The new year, of course, is a good time to look back as well as forward. At this time of year, we are thankful for our wonderful customers that we work with every day. Whatever your resolutions, (and whether you stick to them or not), we thank you for your business, and wish you the very best of luck and happiness in 2020!