My Top 5 lessons learned in 2018

At the end of each year, it is a good time to look back and think about all the things that happened during the year, what was done well what teaches us some lessons. It is important to do this before setting any new goals to get clear with the past and set your mind for next year.

In this article, I will share my top 5 lessons learned in 2018. Before we review my list there is an important update to share first. At the beginning of the year 2018, I decided to monitor very closely all action I do and all wins and lessons I get from those actions. I adapted the system created by Brendon Burchard similar to his daily planner. You can see and download my weekly planner here. Using this template I got so many lessons and was able to correct my action much faster than before. In the end, it resulted in some very good wins some of them you can find in the list below.

But now let’s review my top 5 lessons learned in 2018.

1. If it is not on your calendar it with high probability will not be done (or done in time).

The year 2018 was a year of productivity for me. I did a lot of experiments and tried different tools to monitor myself and to organize my daily actions and todo list. In the end, most effective way to get results for me is – a calendar in combination with self-discipline. Your calendar is your Boss.

All tasks that can take more than 10 minutes your time and has to be done go into the calendar. If it takes less – do it as it appears or park it and set time slot in your calendar to clean up all those small tasks.

An additional lesson was related to email. We receive more and more email messages and a lot of people including me find themselves trapped. Instead of reading all emails and respond to them right away I learned first to process emails:

• – respond or delegate right away if it takes less than 5 min,
• – if more sort by specific folders and come back later
• – create calendar events to allocate response times
• – and delete or archive unnecessary or completed/responded emails

In this way, you will have a clean inbox and much organized day.

Do not forget to plan and set time slot in your calendar for yourself and your family. For example, I have a time slot on my calendar to have time with my wife without kids – a “Date night” each week.

2. They certainly do not think what you think they think.

Long long years I was suffering from this fear, from fear of what others would think. My imagination is at the highest level and that kept me away from my goals and even from everyday tasks. With some experiments today I understand that before to start imagining what they think it is better to ask or event don’t worry about that. Guess what? Very very often they do not even think about or have not noticed what you worry about.

3. Be present. Use small 5 min transition times to switch between daily tasks/events

The most important lesson I learned from my 4-year-old. Time to time our kids drive us crazy and even we got angry. So, when I started to monitor myself I found out an interesting lesson. I got angry in those moments when I was not there. Physically I was with my kid but my thoughts were not there..

Then I got a chance to read Brandon Burchard’s book High Performance Habits: How Extraordinary People Become That Way and proved to myself – Be present is one of the most important qualities. It helped not only with my kid or wife, but had a lot of successful results also with my colleagues at work. This is the quality we should practice more and more.

Actually, in the book, I mentioned before there was great exercise – small transition breaks. Use 5 min before any new task or new meeting to let go the previous state of mind and to prepare it for the next one. Image your best self in your upcoming activity, hold that feeling for a minute and you are ready. Now it is a much higher probability to be there physically and also mentally.

4. “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” ― Hippocrates

Another eye-opening book came across my way this year. LET YOUR FOOD BE YOUR PHARMACO-NUTRITION: The new road to health, healing and happiness. by Paul Clayton. We live in the times when we can have everything that we want, our scientist has researched a lot of different ways to heal all possible diseases, we have drugstores more than necessary, our hospitals have all best equipment you can imagine, but in the same time, we get sicker and sicker. Look around – allergies, heart diseases, cancers, diabetes, overweight, and list goes on and on. We are suffering from our lifestyle diseases.

Paul Clayton in his book describe some basics where all that came from and also there are powerful solutions what to do with that. In a couple of words, it is all about our food what we eat and how balanced we can get that. You can read more about his balance concept here in one of my blog posts this year or grab your book on Amazon.

5. Set goals, execute on them and do not forget to align them with your partners.

Everyone has heard that our goals should be SMART – Specific-Measurable-Achievable-Revelant–Time-Based. This year I found out that there is one more component we should think when setting our goals.

We do not live in the world alone and our goals at least most of them have related also to other people. We should achieve them together or we need someone’s help or we should help someone to achieve our goals. So if you want to reach your goals make sure you align them with others, with your partners, with your family members even with your kids. If all of them will be involved in your journey for your goals you will get much more energy and achieving them becomes much easier.

When you set SMART goals for the year 2019 – write down also who may be involved in any role to achieve that goal and your journey will become much easier.

“People with goals succeed because they know where they are going. It’s as simple as that.” Earl Nightingale

Have a lot of success in year 2019!

Please share also in a comment what was your main lesson of the year 2018.