Well, here we are at the beginning of the New Year so full of hopes, dreams and plans. As much as I’m focused on looking forward I do see a great value in looking back. The main purpose being to assess and evaluate. What went right and what went wrong? Did I achieve what I planned? What did I learn? Anything I can do differently? I think you get the picture.

❗WARNING❗ don’t fall into a trap of going there and staying there. And definitely no regrets. They are pure poison. I look at the past to learn and move on.

The research shows that 90% of our resolutions do not stand the test of time. Since I hate being in the majority and I hate failing even more I wondered if there was a better way. Come to find out, there’s a research for it too. In a nutshell - focus on one, maybe two things at most that you want to change and work consistently on it. Once you reach the point where this one thing feels like a habit, add another one and repeat the process. Now this makes sense to me and I’ve had good results with this method in the past so there’s something to it.

Since we all are constantly bombarded with great ideas how to optimize our lives I will keep my suggestions to just a few and spread them in time so hopefully you will find some of them useful and won’t get overwhelmed.

Here’s one - SLEEP. We can’t live without it yet we are experts at dicking it up. We even celebrate how little we sleep in the name of blah, blah, blah. Yes, you can exist on little sleep for a while and keep telling yourself whatever you want but it’s lies and it’ll eventually catch up to you. Sleep can literally add years to your life! Maybe it’s worth taking seriously?

Aim for 7-8 hours every night.

Helpful tip: set a schedule to go to bed and wake up at the same time, even on weekends and days off. For all Apple users, you can set it up in Health and it’ll remind you.

I have it all set up and my watch is tracking all the vitals because it’s fun for me. But it works and when I deviate from the schedule, it shows. And remember, we are not robots so don’t act like one. But knowing what’s good for us might help how we set our priorities and benefit us in the long run. After all life is a marathon, not a sprint.

~Pawel