5 Ways to Get More Results This Year

Happy New Year to all of our readers! We are back, refreshed and raring to go after our holidays and hope that you are too. In the coming year we hope that Bitesize Bio will be your indispensable companion, bringing you articles that keep you informed on the best literature, products, tech tips, news and views in molecular and cell biology.

The start of the new year is always a good time to reflect on where things are going and how they can be improved, so I thought it would be good to start off with some points I will be addressing this year to give my career and practices a bit of an overhaul for 2008. I hope they will also be food for thought for you - so please feel free to comment on them, or share your own new year’s resolutions. Here are 5 areas I will be focusing on to maximize my results this year, I will…

1. Love what I am doing. If you truly love your job, you are sure to get good results as you will naturally focus your energies on it. You may, as I do, have something less than absolute true love for your job - I do love my job, a lot of the time, but have a tendency to get down about it when results are not going well or the workload seems overwhelming, which only makes things worse by reducing my focus.

This year I will work on maximizing my performance by improving my perception of my job. I’ll do that by always thinking about my work positively and optimistically and always looking for ways to make it more enjoyable and centered on my true desires.

If you are unlucky enough to genuinely hate your job, maybe it’s time to think about doing something different… see Suzanne’s article on alternative career choices for scientists for some ideas.

2. Define my goals and pursue them. Goals have to be exciting and inspiring, or they are no good at all so loving your job obviously helps with this. Writing your goals down and talking positively to yourself about them will make them seem more real and obtainable, while sharing them with others makes you accountable so more likely to take action. So here goes:

• I will streamline my work practices so that I can work more efficiently (see points 3 and 4 for starters)
• I have two very important, year-long projects landing on my desk this month. These are two ready made goals since if I can make a success of either or both of these it will be huge. I will be aiming to make both a success.
• I will improve Bitesize Bio and get more subscribers. Over the coming year I intend to make Bitesize Bio even more useful to our readers by expanding the volume and type of articles we produce. This will hopefully help with the other goal of getting more subscribers. Currently we have 150 - I’d like to get it into the 1000’s by the end of the year (you can help!).
• On a personal level, my main goal is to improve my fitness - I did quite well with this last year, but this year I have set myself the goal of exercising every day this year (…it’s going well so far!)

3. Model my environment for results. When I return to work I will de-clutter my desk, bench and computer desktop, throw away things I don’t need, like piles of papers and books that I (will) never read and get rid of applications that waste my time and energy (Facebook, flickr, messenger etc.).

4. Work Smarter. The Pareto principle (80% of the results come from 20% of the work) is often quoted, but few people do anything about is. I will identify which of my actions are in the productive 20% and wasteful 80% then work to eliminate the wasteful and do more of the productive. Another point – one which I will be trying very hard to implement this year – is don’t multi-task. Studies have shown that multi-tasking is not productive and simply generates more stress!

5. Read better. Information and knowledge is key to great science, and much of it comes from reading. But we can only read and process a limited amount of information so I will make sure I are reading the right stuff. I will delete bookmarks and RSS feeds to sites that don’t really contribute to my knowledge and take up Dan’s suggestion to use Hubmed to focus and streamline my literature coverage. I am also thinking about learning to speed-read.

Later in the year, I’ll let you know how things are going! Don’t forget to share your own input, or your own new year’s resolutions by adding a comment…

Photo: Rob Wallace