Bob Goldman
You have no one to blame but yourself.
January is over and you’re still driving yourself crazy, coming up with ideas for how you can make up for the career disaster that was 2023 by starting 2024 right.
Just like you did in 2022 and 2021 and every other year since your January solution to starting kindergarten right was alphabetizing your crayon box.
It didn’t work then, and it won’t work now. Why? Because the secret of job success is not doing everything right; it’s doing everything wrong.
You heard me. When you set out to do everything right, you set yourself up for failure. When you set out to do everything wrong, anything positive that comes from it will feel like a win. Your manager may be disappointed, but you’ll feel like you’re making progress.
Which brings us to Danielle Abril, the author of “Work Reset: 13 Tips to Make Your Job Less Stressful this Year,” a timely article in The Washington Post. A positive thinker who believes “the new year is a good time to take a moment before the hustle and bustle to reset at work,” Abril made it her job to start your 2024 right.
Thirteen tips sounds like a lot, so I will cut the stress for both of us and only review five. All you have to do is do the exact opposite.
No. 1: Reestablish your boundaries.
If you spent 2023 battling your boss over working from home or working from work, the right way to start the new year is to give your manager what they want — your body, wrapped in a ribbon and tied with a bow, inside a cubicle — for life. The wrong way to start the year is to give them your body, but not your mind. Go into your cubicle, but bring your comfy recliner with you, your fuzzy slippers and cuddly stuffies and, of course, your wardrobe of threadbare PJs.
Manifest your inner slob and your boss will be begging you to work from home, guaranteed.
No. 2: Assess your priorities.
You started 2023 the right way, focusing on working hard and producing excellent results for the company. And where did that get you? Exactly nowhere.
The wrong way to start 2024 is to make clear to everyone, including yourself, that your No. 1 priority is to make as much money as possible while working as little as possible.
Your co-workers may object, but your manager will understand. It’s been their No. 1 priority since forever.
“Look at the calendar and evaluate when you were most productive and when you were least,” recommends productivity expert Joshua Zerkel. This shouldn’t be difficult. The time you were most productive in 2023 were the two weeks when you were on vacation. Sitting under a Tuscan sun or dipping your toes in warm Caribbean waters, you had the time to grok fully how you could be most productive at work. Unfortunately, when you returned to the office and spent 50 weeks trying to put your brilliant ideas into practice, productivity dropped to zero.
The solution is obvious. To be fully productive in 2024, schedule 50 weeks of vacation and two weeks of work. You’ll get a lot done and get a good tan, too.
No. 4: Leverage digital tools.
Starting 2024 the right way, mastering digital tools such as artificial intelligence, is genuine idiocy. AI is out to take your job, and there’s no reason to help it. The wrong technology to master is an obscure business tool called a pencil. To use this ancient tech, you grasp a stick of graphite enclosed in a thin piece of wood. This tool can be leveraged most successfully in meetings by feverishly scribbling when your manager speaks, giving the impression that you are actually listening to what is said.
Master the pencil in 2024. In 2025, you can master the eraser.
No. 5: Adjust your notifications.
The right way to start 2024 is to commit to being more responsive to the emails, texts, voicemails and Slack messages you receive 24/7. The wrong way is to turn off all your notifications. Your co-workers may be annoyed by their inability to reach you in critical situations, but by not responding, you’re sure to make fewer mistakes.
At the end of the year, when you retrieve your messages, everything that seemed so urgent will be shown not to have mattered. Best of all, a new, new year will stretch out before you.
Welcome to 2025 — the year in which you finally get everything wrong.
Bob Goldman was an advertising executive at a Fortune 500 company. He offers a virtual shoulder to cry on at bob@bgplanning.com.
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