Capitalizing on Winter Weather and Staying Indoors

Enroll in a LinkedIn course or Elevated Learning Opportunity

As we often speak about, the world is truly a candidate’s oyster year-round as it relates to elevating professional expertise and skills. Whether on LinkedIn, Google, Amazon, Adobe, or entirely separate from social platforms, the internet hosts an endless number of resources through which to enroll in learning opportunities. If you are even beginning to ponder the idea of a promotion, job shift, or industry change, then this is the perfect time to engage and create goals!

We encourage you to begin your learning journey by simply surfing the web to identify the naming conventions of skills that appeal to you, scan through job postings to gauge the skills listed, or even take a course for fun! The idea of practicing learning is one that will provide value throughout the rest of your entire life, and ‘exercising’ the muscle that is your brain, outside of daily repetitive tasks, is a perfect way to stay sharp and ahead of the curve in 2024.

Creating a Reading Goal or Trying out a New Genre

Similarly to the idea of ‘learning’, taking up reading as a hobby in the winter is a key point in the year through which to create tangible change. Whether this looks like taking advantage of online platforms like ‘Good Reads‘ to create annual goals, or writing down a few books that you’re interested in this season, reading is a perfect pathway to help you unplug from the drain of a workday and escape through any genre of your choice. If you’re seeking a challenge, we encourage you to frame goals around new genres, ‘self-help’ or industry-focused books, or otherwise poke into a subject you have no prior knowledge of.

Cleaning Out Your Spaces One-by-One

Finally, we encourage you to embrace the ‘refresh’ that comes with a New Year. It’s never too late to get started, either on January 1st, tomorrow or throughout the year, refreshing your space by keeping it clean and intentionally decluttering is a key strategy for sustaining work-from-home energy and motivation. While approaching an entire apartment or home may feel daunting, splitting cleaning up into ‘phases’ through dividing out rooms, areas of a room (ex: your closet, dresser, cabinets, drawers, etc.), or sections of your home will compartmentalize a task into approachable steps. In doing so, it is also optimal to create accountability through consistency: Can you dedicate 10 minutes each day to de-cluttering? One hour each week? One afternoon per month? Whichever cadence most seamlessly fits into your routine will undoubtedly prove most sustainable long-term.

• Extra Tip: When and where able, reward yourself! Creating incentives through ‘chores’ turned into activities is a simple strategy to transform dread or procrastination into excitement. For example, if you declutter your closet, you can create a reward by purchasing new closet organizers to optimize the space. If you, similarly declutter a makeup drawer, maybe it’s time to take a trip to your nearest Sephora and replenish some items! Creating small ‘wins’ is a helpful strategy to make ‘fun’ out of seemingly ‘mundane’ tasks.