Good intentions, diets, exercising and New Year resolutions. Hey, it’s already February! Have you made, started, delayed or abandoned your resolution? No worries. This blog features resolutions and traditions from our employees. May they help inspire you to start the New Year (or February) with positive goals. Before jumping into individual resolutions, let’s start with a lovely tradition from one of our team.
“My family makes two resolutions each year. One is something you don’t want to repeat from the previous year. And the other is something you want to strive for this year. And then we gather the little children as a family and all come up with something, write it down, dig a Christmas tree out of our front yard and bring it inside, decorate it, and then we plant it. We bury the little things that everyone wrote down underneath the tree”.
I resolve to change my sleep habits. I spend a lot of time working late, answering emails and having terrible sleep habits. I’m going to try and change that, and then try and be more purposeful and decisive with decision making rather than waffling on things or putting things off.
Learn to say no to things because I am typically a people pleaser. If somebody asks me to do things, I’m like, “sure, I can do that”. I don’t give a lot of thought to the impact, which means that I’m scrambling to juggle family commitments, work commitments, everything. So, I’m trying to take a pause before I say yes to things and actually decide if it is something I really want to do. Or am I just trying to say yes to make the person happy and go away?
Focus more. I have been distracted with too many things going on in terms of project work and all that. I’m trying to be focused and look less at Teams and Outlook when working on something else.
Try to be more deliberate with my time. Typically, if I have 15 minutes spare, I feel I can’t start anything in 15 minutes, but you can accomplish a lot if you pick the right tasks. I’m trying to be more conscious of that and waste less time by embracing small pockets of time.
Be more active. Over the last year, I haven’t been exercising or moving much, and I can feel it. I think exercising will help generate some dopamine and give me more energy for every day and for work, think more critically when solving problems o make sure that I’m doing the right thing to solve the problem and not just rushing and doing it.
Find more time at work and at home for doing nothing. I’ve noticed that when you schedule nothing into your calendar, amazing things happen.
My personal resolution is the same that I’ve had since 2020: lose some weight – to fit better in my chair.
Work related, keep our CAPAs in the system at 100 or less. Our CAPA camera system often has fluff in it and some are just complaints. I want to try and contain that.
Get a 1440pixel 27-inch monitor. I find that it provides a very sharp image giving just the right pixel density to enable you to use 1 to 1 scaling in your operating system.
I don’t make resolutions anymore. I stopped making those about 20 years ago because I find them useless.
Get better at prioritizing or being mindful of the time that I have in a day. And learning that not everything needs to get done within eight hours and some things can wait. Then once I’m learning what doesn’t have to be done that day, to say “no”.
Cultivate empathy. That’s not emphasized much in engineering, but something I want to work on.
Now a closing thought on New Year’s resolutions: “I used to make New Year’s resolutions and in fact in the last few years I’ve stopped doing that. Generally, I am sort of trying to keep my goals active throughout the year. I don’t find that making them on January 1 has been very helpful in helping me make meaningful change”.
If you like the thinking displayed in these resolutions, consider working with us as an employee or as a developer for your medical device project. And whichever method or goal you use to set New Year resolutions. may your 2024 be happy, healthy and prosperous.
Image: Adobe Stock
Astero StarFish is the attributed author of StarFish Medical team blogs. We value teamwork and collaborate on all of our medical device development projects.
