Get Motivated: Are You Ready For 2022?

Are you ready to get motivated for the upcoming year? With the holidays on the horizon, it’s time to review what worked this year, and what didn’t. I admit I’m eager to see the last of 2021.

Get motivated: what worked for you this year?

Did you struggle this year? You’re not alone. In last week’s writers’ group meeting, we discussed our challenges this year.

Several writers admitted they’d neglected to set goals. Although I set goals, I changed them often. At work, many projects either changed, or clients were forced to cancel them.

Something that worked for me this year: building new habits, especially giving myself fewer choices in order to avoid decision fatigue:

Instead of standing at my wardrobe each morning wondering what to wear, I made a list of clothes for the week on Sunday afternoon.

I made meal plans too. This turned out to be a great decision. Not only did our family’s diet improve because we ordered fewer takeaway meals, I saved money and time by buying in bulk. I finally got my pantry organized the way I want it.

My next step in meal planning: finding a digital recipe organizer which integrates grocery shopping. It’s frustrating to start meal preparation, then realize that you either don’t have an essential ingredient, or that the ingredient’s use-by date was October 2018.

Going forward, I want to:

• Become more productive at work, by creating better routines—this will help with decision fatigue too;
• Create one major goal at work, and at home, for 2022. This year, I felt I lacked focus, which meant more stress. Setting a single goal for the two major areas of my life should help with that.

Our group discussed motivation too. How do you get motivated?

Get motivated: is there a secret?

Perhaps there isn’t a secret to motivation.

As this article, Warning! Don’t Expect to Be Motivated by Motivation, points out:

Instead of thinking about motivation, I argue that we should think about aims, and then concrete, practical, realistic steps to take us closer to our aims.

I like the idea of deciding what you want, then mapping out a plan to achieve it. Motivation is tricky. For me, it leads to procrastination. It’s too easy to put things off until you “get motivated.”

Planning your activities for the new year means thinking about how you’ll do it. I love my bullet journals, but recently I’ve explored a couple of digital planners as well. I’ll talk about them in a future post.

What about you? Are you looking for ways to get motivated so that 2022 will be wonderful year?

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Photo by Cristofer Maximilian on Unsplash