December is here, along with its festive atmosphere, packed calendars, and year-end pressures. For many of us, it’s one of the hardest months to stay productive. Between office parties, family gatherings, shortened workweeks, and the mental load of wrapping up the year, maintaining focus can become a real challenge.
When it comes to managing your time at work, you’re often trapped in a relentless loop of ticking off daily tasks. Yet, shifting focus toward goal oriented performance rather than mere checklists can unlock substantial progress and align efforts with what genuinely drives long-term success.
January can be a tough month, especially after the excitement and joy of December. The post-holiday winter blues is real, and it’s common to feel sluggish, unmotivated, and disconnected from your goals. But it’s exactly this time of year that you need to refocus and get back on track.
Perfectionism is often viewed as a good thing. At the same time, perfectionism is often correlated with anxiety because these two concepts snowball together. You want something to be perfect because of the anxiety that comes with failure, which ends up creating more anxiety as you strive toward perfection.
For many companies, January signals more than the beginning of a new year. It is also the start of a fiscal year with new goals, deadlines, and challenges ahead. December is treated as a period for reflecting on the past 12 months while gearing up for the year ahead. Thus, it’s the perfect time to prepare for a successful new year.
If you’ve struggled with anxiety or fear of failure at work, you’re not alone. Employees often deal with feelings that they may not be qualified enough for a position or that they lack the ability to perform as well as their peers. There is a term for this feeling of not being good enough or qualified enough: the imposter syndrome.
Since the dawns of humanity, people have used the cyclicity of time—sunrise/sunset, day/night—to make it measurable and easier to predict. Because when you know what follows, things are easier to deal with. Back in the day when people lived in caves, they used this known variation to optimize their hunting process. And then slowly, days turned into weeks, months and years. We invented work days and week-ends and now we know when to work and when to rest. Suddenly, at some point in history—most might not know it, but there is a perfectly logical explanation for this—the beginning of a new year has suffered a dramatic transformation. It swiftly became a threshold, a time when you leave the past behind, gaze into the future full of hope, and even make a resolution of some sort.
Focus at work is under siege. Everything can interrupt your focus. Coworkers asking you out on a break. A nearby call ringing its way into your focus. And most of all, the myriad distractions new tech put on the table. The buzzes, the dings, the rings. The trouble is, if you don’t focus at work, work doesn’t get done by itself. Hence, focus at work matters.
Achievable goals are the pinnacle of a smart goal-setting strategy. Sure, you should be able to achieve your goals, generally speaking. Yet, there is a lot more to achievable goals. This is because goals are high-productivity enablers. By itself, goal-setting provides structure to individual or team efforts.
And making sure that goals are achievable builds on that. Most of all, achievable goals motivate. They become a milestone. One that requires resilience. To put it simply, achievable goals are something people feel. Achievable goals reward because they feel like the achievement that they are.
Successful teams are what drives any company. They are what makes the difference. And, above all, it’s successful teams that make or break your business.
However, creating successful teams isn’t quite science yet. After all, you can put a bunch of very smart and talented people together, and still fail miserably. Or you can band together a group of people that, for whatever reason, synergize. They click together, overcome obstacles, and overachieve.
