Like most people, I’ve spent some of the festive period reflecting on what I want to change about myself in 2012. Some of it is personal, while some of it relates to my job. Curious as to what my colleagues were hoping to accomplish this year, I asked around the office to see what other work-related resolutions had been made. I figured that if I published our resolutions on this blog, we’ll be more likely to stick to them. And of course I can name and shame this time next year. So here’s a selection:
- Spend more time hanging out in the social media and digital Linked-In groups (Emma)
- Learn French on my Kindle, when they finally release a Kindle Fire that is (Jen)
- Become a social media monitoring tools whizz kid (Paula)
- Nominate and win an award for our design and creative work (Phil)
- Produce an app (Phil & Lauren)
- Learn how to fully use my Macbook Pro – I’m still a PC user bumbling my way along (Tom)
- Learn how to use Photoshop properly – to get the best from my photography (Tom)
- Dedicate more hours to playing video games. I think this will be a massive year in terms of releases and playing online (Jamie)
- Visit more digital and tech festivals and events (e.g. Digital Shoreditch, SXSW) than last year (Lauren)
- Improve Spanish to business level (Lauren)
- Be involved in a really innovative Customer Reference Programme (CRP) project. We’re talking about lots of exciting new approaches to CRP, 2012 is the year we’ll put some in practice (Kat)
- Take more time to read and learn – sometimes it’s difficult finding the time to stop working and spend a little while just absorbing new information (Kat)
- Spend time every week keeping up-to-date with what’s new in social media and share it with the team (Becky)
- Attend more exhibitions and events to gain more creative inspiration (Becky)
- Keep my email in a semi-organised state, rather than the labyrinthine mess it’s in now (Chris)
- Create a beautifully minimalist, wire-free and lossless music set up in my flat, to go with the lovely new speakers I’m working on constructing (Chris)
Do you have any resolutions that you want to share? Or anything you want to say about ours? Regardless of our resolutions, here’s hoping we all have a brilliant 2012.
In Stylist this morning there was an interesting article on NY resolutions, or more importantly on how they help test your overall willpower. Looking at the things we want to change is our own way of transforming ourselves into the person we imagine is our ‘ideal self’. Having read this article and looked back over some of Catalysis’s resolutions, the good news is that we are see 2012 as a learning experience. Some NY resolutions, usually starting with ‘give up…’ or ‘stop doing…’ which tend to be the ones that are more likely to result in failure (around 88% according to Stylist). Willpower has been something that we have been encouraged to have from an early age although this may have slipped over time.
Perhaps we could test the Cataly’ team in a similar way to the Marshmallow test, first conducted by Walter Miscel in ’68. A group of four year old children were invited into a room where a single marshmallow sat on a plate. They were told that, if they wanted, they could eat it immediately. However if they didn’t touch it for 15 minutes, they could have two.
If you are one of the people who would have walked into the room and eaten the marshmallow before the task was explained, then there is still hope. Willpower is like a muscle, it can be strengthened by small repetitive acts.
So perhaps we should have an earlier check point for our resolutions, on that note ‘bonne chance’