The start of the year can be both rejuvenating and overwhelming. There’s a couple of reasons for this.
First, many people tackle new challenges and resolutions that require a great deal of willpower and discipline. Secondly, many people are working hard to close out the calendar year that recently came to an end and are also in the process of kicking the new calendar year into action. That’s a lot to do, which results in a lot of not doing well instead.
Wrapping up and ramping up shouldn’t intersect nearly as much as they do in the early months of the year. In fact, they shouldn’t intersect like that at any time of year. Ideally, you’ll want to have much of the wrapping up done before you ramp up anything else.
Why?
Because wrapping up and ramping up require a great deal of equal attention, and when you split your focus between the two then neither of them will be done as well as they could be. For example, the month about to end is usually the month where I start to build up for the months ahead. But I got sick early last month with a nasty virus that took nearly five weeks to shake completely, so that threw my wrapping up of the months gone by way out of whack. So I spent the last month wrapping up certain things, eliminating others, and I still have some correspondence to take care of and commitments to move forward with that have yet to be moved at all. I’ve moved small things ahead, but none of the big things.
But that’s okay because I’ve been focused more on the wrapping up than the ramping up because I know the results of at least one of those actions will suffer otherwise.
Wrapping up and ramping up are necessary to move forward effectively. The key is to make sure you focus on them one at a time in order to maximize your overall effectiveness.
Photo credit: bury-osiol via SXC.HU
