The slower-paced winter months can become a time of scaling back and simplifying. This is a great time of year to revisit good habits and routines, declutter the nooks and crannies of life, refocus on the highest priorities, and let go of that which no longer serves a positive role. Here are five ways to simplify life in the first quarter of a new year.
Prioritize
Simplifying life inherently means directing your focus on what’s important and unburdening yourself from what’s not. In order to do that, you need to be clear about what’s important.Take some time to consider: What are the highest priorities in your life? Actually writing these down can be a powerful exercise. Your list of priorities may include your and your family’s health, your children’s education, your marriage, spending quality time with loved ones, the care and keeping of your home, your vision for your work in the world, or your consistent attention to your spiritual practice. When you know what you need to focus your effort and attention on, simplifying life becomes much easier.
Improve Habits
A significant portion of our actions and even thoughts occur each day out of habit. Whether you foster positive or negative habits has an enormous impact on your life.Considering the priorities you identified as most important, ask yourself what habits you’d need to foster to ensure those priorities are best advanced. For example, if a top priority is your health, some supporting habits might be shopping weekly for healthy groceries, going for a daily walk, lifting weights a few times each week, drinking a certain amount of water each day, or scheduling a regular physical activity with others.
Consider whether any of your current habits are detrimental to your highest priorities. Do you waste time scrolling social media apps? Do you shop too much, overspending and adding to the clutter in your home? Do you avoid the work you know you should be doing? When you identify habits you’d like to break, aim to replace them with a more positive habit that you’ll actually be inclined to do.
Establish Rules and Routines
Likewise, rules we set for ourselves and routines we adopt each day, each week, or each month can help to automate our behavior in a positive way that supports our priorities.For example, you might set a rule for yourself that you don’t pick up your phone until after noon or that you go to bed at least eight hours before your morning alarm. You might establish a routine of journaling each morning or establishing one day a week that’s reserved for meetings or beginning dinner preparations at a certain time each afternoon. Rules and routines may sound like a stifling proposition, but they actually free up your mental bandwidth and reduce decision fatigue.
