10 simple habits you need to track in 2019

The New Year is a great time: the calendar displaying '01', the first month of the year, suggests having a fresh start and taking action. So why not make best of this time and enjoy the holiday season by riding the motivational wave so that surfing along the coming months went smooth?

Yes, everybody always starts with feeling determined and highly motivated to proceed with losing that weight or going to that gym or increasing the income to a six-figure-number but at some point, everybody forgets those resolutions, and they turn into wishful thinking.
The reason behind this failure scenario is actually quite obvious: motivation is a great starter but fuel for sailing forward is a habit.

The habits are important because they build our identity and shape us as personalities. If you do not develop a habit you are doomed to run out of energy before reaching the destination.
According to Coach.me, people mostly pursuit habits implying spiritual and physical activities and traditionally include into their sets of New Year resolutions 'meditating regularly', 'exercising every day', 'reducing consumption of alcohol to not at all', etc.

Below is the list of 10 habits you can easily cultivate in a new year.  

Wake up early

There are tons of confirmations in favor of starting a day with the early morning routine. Waking up with the sunrise is the natural mechanism within our circadian clocks. If we disregarded the artificial light and the presence of all the gadgets, we would synchronize to solar time easily. In case you experience the setbacks, do not let it affect your progress.
If you are ready to power through it, you will surely get “unstuck” as the quantity eventually turns into quality.

Drink more water

The ugly effects of dehydration are easy to recognize by having dull, dry skin, feeling weak or experiencing dizziness. Water is revitalizing so keeping ‘8 glasses per day’ routine is essential for your physical well-being.

You can track performing this simple task by setting a reminder in your phone to root a habit. Controlling water intake comes naturally after at max 4 weeks.

Learn To Speak A Foreign Language

Joining the multimillion community of Chinese/Spanish/German/French, etc. speakers is a rewarding experience. Let alone the exciting idea of visiting the country and understanding what local people say, there are benefits that, according to the recent scientific research, the language learners can enjoy like memory quality improvement and the attention span increase.

When becoming bilingual, you exercise your brain, boost your concentration and polish your analytical skills to perfection.

Write a Journal for at least 10 minutes a day

Whatever ideas you have, it is worth writing them down before you forget them. Who knows, maybe this way of managing your thoughts will be a perfect mindmapping solution to help you find a path to success in the new year.

Take advantage of the benefits that social media can give. They keep track of your stories. The skill of presentation, as well as storytelling, becomes a dominating trend. Creating a powerful online presence through introducing engaging stories is great in terms of boosting your creativity and making your business visible to the wider audience.  

Probably the best way to start a new year is to concentrate on work-related habits that increase your personal productivity because they are the hardest to cultivate and most significant to keep.
They enhance your professional profile and bring long-term positive changes.

Set priorities for your day

Results are achieved slower when you constantly encounter obstacles. You might find yourself in a situation when you don’t hit your goals. To prevent chaos at work, there is a simple solution: make it a habit to set daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly/yearly priorities. Sounds boring? But rewarding, to say the least.
Identifying what is important for the current day will save you tons of time. Any tasks, especially comprising epic multi-stage projects, need clear priorities. It helps be more responsive and efficient, and by experience of those who troubled themselves with tracking prioritizing, it does pay off.

Write to do list

Visualizing things you plan to do helps get things done in a more efficient way. It is proved that people manage better when they have written down what they need to do. Moreover, once you see your list of tasks marked or color-coded for labeling their urgency, it is highly likely to help you feel in charge and never fall behind.
Fortunately, the choice of software for sorting out your priorities is huge. We would suggest the apps that have multi-functional options. For example, TMetric can be applied as ‘all-in-one’ software: a task planner, a time tracker, an activity scanner, a report generator.)

No Screens After 10pm

The apps that track your consumption online content are getting more popular, and it is clear why, especially in regard of the evening traditionally associated with having quality time with your family.

Besides, the limits you put on the screen time will be rewarding in terms of sync with healthier sleep routine, which, in its turn, will increase your productivity and overall well-being in the morning.
No email before breakfast

Striving for zero inbox can be a noble mission but starting your day with trying to accomplish it might be a very unwise decision. Managing the email before breakfast will surely exhaust your determination to stick to the daily to-do list and will consume the precious time. Treat your morning as launching time for your productivity and do not let the email routine become your hurdle.  

No Facebook at work

The social media integrated into our daily routine but it does not deny that some social media platforms like Facebook become just a source of the aimless scrolling and distract you from the priorities you smartly set beforehand. Creating distraction-free work environments is the case of easier said than done but with a simple trick of tracking the time, things transform.  
Make the time tracker your accountability partner, and the issue of unnecessary presence on the social media in terms of utilizing your work time will be solved automatically.

Whatever habit you want to include into your 2019 list, you need to  remember that the best way to build a habit is to take these three steps:

Link the habit you want to build to a habit you already have

We do not know much about our brain. But we do know it has neuroplasticity, which means that every time you make a repetitive decision, it gets physically wired into your brain and forms the neuronal connections. Take advantage of this amazing adaptive mechanism and anchor the habit easier by linking it to the habit you already have. For example, if you have the habit of waking up early it will be easy to develop a habit of filling this hassle-free time with meditation/exercise/eating healthy breakfast, etc.

Keep your habit at this ‘baby stage’ tracked and monitored

It will help it grow faster. Lots of people had the experience of tracking their habits on and off for some time in the past. If you gave up, it means that you did not find the right assisting tool. Digital time trackers seem an ideal solution for those who plan to see through their time usage. Keeping track of your online activity will increase your business productivity by generating reports on time utilization and giving you an overview of your working routine in detail. Once you get hold of your timeline, it will be easy to incorporate the healthy habits into your day.  

Reward yourself in between  

Craving for rewards is imprinted in the psychological patterns of human behavior: we tend to maintain a positive habit easier in case the benefits we expect are reachable. Thus, you should never ignore rewarding yourself in the process of building a new habit. For instance, if you learn a new language and make progress, take a break and buy yourself a ticket to the movie: you might even hit two birds with one stone by going to the best movie theater and practicing further if the movie goes in the original with the supporting subtitles.

Final thoughts

When fully armed with good intentions and efficient assistants, it gets easy to commit to cultivating new good habits that will help you present to the world your new super self. Not to look back on the list of new year resolutions with disappointment, just make 2019 the year you do not change your mind about becoming new you.