How To Reset Your Life And Have The Best Year Ever

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And just like that, Christmas season is over, New Year arrived, and now we’re in the middle of January somehow. How is it even possible?!

So now the question is… how are your goals doing? Have you started working on them or ditched them entirely? Maybe you’re stressed out that you haven’t set them and now it’s too late for that?

Even though everyone has high hopes for 1st January and the clean slate it supposedly comes with, it guarantees nothing. Genuine change takes more than calendar shifts, it needs real action.

That’s why it doesn’t matter whether you did a 2023 review two weeks ago or you’ll do it tomorrow.

It doesn’t matter whether you forgot your goals or haven’t set them yet.

What matters is your willingness to make a change, and, 1st January isn’t a magic date, it’s just another chance to choose change.

The best time to reset your life and change it for the better is NOW.

So, don’t worry about the date on your calendar, okay?

And if you don’t know how to reset your life, don’t worry. I collected all the tips and tricks into this blog post, so you can have a cheat sheet of some sorts. Let’s dive in!

How To Reset Your Life: Reset Your Home

Three years ago something changed, and I started noticing how badly clutter affects my well-being. I’ve never been bothered by it before – I was used to it and didn’t know any better. One day, I woke up with a strong urge to declutter and organise one of the spare rooms we had. It changed everything for me. When I saw what a difference it made, I kept going. I threw away lots of things. Sixty bin bags full of clutter.

Look around your house. Check for the visible clutter, things that you were supposed to get rid of but never did, etc.

Let’s look around my house for a second.

When you look around my kitchen, you won’t find many things. But what you’ll find is a mess and a bunch of empty cupboards because I didn’t know how to organise it when we moved here and it simply stayed this way. I’m completely clueless when it comes to organising the kitchen! Space under the stairs became a clutter spot where we chuck everything we don’t need right now. Couch is surrounded by blankets scattered all around it.

All those “problems” are easy to fix and are very rewarding.

Dedicate a few hours to reset your home and tackle as much as you can to make your home feel clean and organised again. It will help you feel calm and in control, trust me!

How To Reset Your Life: Reset Your Mind

Mind is a powerful tool. It can control how we feel, what we do, and how we do it. That’s why it’s so important to pay attention to your mindset and mental health.

Every day you spend hours on your phone, most of the time scrolling social media. You consume hours of content which influence you in one way or another. If Instagram and TikTok are the reasons you neglect your hobbies, you might be addicted to them.

It’s not as uncommon as you might think! 45% of US online users aged 18 to 22 years reported feeling addicted to social media.

Our phones give us a constant ability to be stimulated. If you’re bored, you take your phone out.

Need to do housework? That’s a pass. It’s too boring, especially compared to scrolling through TikTok.

Watching short form content releases dopamine, which you then require more and more of. Housework tasks aren’t as rewarding as scrolling through socials, so it’s no wonder that you’re choosing the latter option.

Take a break from the Internet for a day.

Go for a social media detox. I tried it two years ago, and it was such a blessing! It always surprises me how scrolling Instagram kills my creativity and steals my energy.

Once you decide to ditch your phone for a day, spend this time on your own and pamper yourself, if you can. Do whatever makes you happy as long as it’s away from any screens – draw, write, meditate, do jigsaw puzzle (my fav!). Do a yearly review and see what goals have you achieved and which you haven’t and why. Set new goals, create your life vision, and define priorities.

Look at your daily habits and routines and check if they still support you as they should. Maybe there’s a thing or two you can swap to make your day even better?

Lately, my phone’s been this weird mix of tempting and off-putting. I get these strong urges to scroll Instagram or Reddit, but then it just leaves me feeling blah in the end. I’m trying to swap it for reading a book but it doesn’t work every time. It makes me wonder how badly addicted I am.

How To Reset Your Life: Reset Your Productivity System

Although I like a good productivity system reset, I’ve noticed over time that it’s not very helpful. Sometimes small tweaks are all that’s needed to boost your productivity and make your life easier. Look at your routines, for example. Sure, you can completely re-do them, but huge changes can be difficult to sustain. Adding or removing a few things instead would do much more good in the long run.

Routines

When you think about routines, there are plenty of them to create. Morning and evening routine are the most obvious ones, but there’s also a weekly, monthly, yearly routine, then daily planning routine, and who knows what else.. Trying to implement all of them at once can be too much.

Focus on what matters the most to you. Would you like to improve your morning or bedtime routine? Pick one thing you’d like to change and commit to it for a week or two. Once you feel comfortable with it, change or add another thing. And another.

Create a list of all the routines you’d like to introduce or improve and what they comprise, so you can always have a cheat sheet to look at.

Don’t forget to create a shorter, minimal version of all your routines for days when you don’t feel well. This will allow you to feel accomplished and good about yourself even if you’re not completely yourself.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re tired, ill, or just feel lazy. Routines should support you, not the other way round.

Open Loops

Do you have a master to do list? If you do, open it and check how many tasks you have on there. Go through them and delete those that aren’t relevant anymore. Then, try to finish as many of them as you can to lessen the overwhelm.

You can also do a brainstorming session and list all the to-dos that have been in your head for ages. You know, those “someday” tasks that take usually 5 minutes tops but they’re “too simple” to do on the spot. Today is the day – finish them once and for all.

Open loops cause stress and overwhelm. If you’ve heard about the Zeigarnik effect, it shouldn’t surprise you. It states that people remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks, which actually makes sense when you think about it. I bet you’ve had some situations where you couldn’t focus on the task on hand because you knew that there are a lot of things that need to be done. It happened to me many times.

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Set Yourself Up For Success

I used to have multiple notebooks for making notes. I used them randomly, with no method in mind, and ended up with notes and to-dos scattered everywhere around me.

Same with productivity apps – I tried them all.

At one point, I was using two or three of them daily, at the same time. Then I switched to Notion where I tried as many templates as I could only find on the Internet. Did they make me more organised? Productive? Not at all.

Even though I spent hours on planning and researching different methods, I didn’t set myself up for success. Productivity system that I designed for myself was a combination of other people’s setup. I took parts I liked the most and created a massive setup that was way more complicated than I’d like it to be.

I ended up ditching it altogether after a couple of weeks.

This experience taught me one thing – just because someone does something in a certain way, it doesn’t mean that it will work for me too.

This year, I completely re-did my productivity workflow. I’m a huge fan of having everything in a digital form and being able to access it from anywhere I want to, but there’s something about digital planning that hasn’t been appealing to me for a long time. It might be because I couldn’t find a planner that would suit my needs entirely, or maybe it’s because of overwhelm and feeling lost. Having to navigate around different apps regarding of situation can be mentally exhausting.

So, I picked ClickUp as my productivity app, and moved away from Notion, Anytype, Google Calendar, Apple Notes, and who knows what else. It was the best idea I’ve had in a long time.

Now, everything is in one place, my business is all organised, personal to-dos have their own space, and there’s no friction at all.

No apps to switch back and forth between them. No scattered notes and ideas. Everything is simplified and I’m finally happy with it.

How To Reset Your Life: Reset Your Phone

When you think about resetting your life, you probably think about your routines, habits, mindset, or environment. Every time I did such reset, I overlooked one thing – my phone. Or rather I should say all my digital space, that also includes my laptop and all the clouds I have.

We use them all the time. Phone is often the very first thing we take after waking up, followed by a computer where you most likely work for 8 hours a day. When was the last time when you looked at your devices and asked yourself if they support you as they should?

First, start by setting an intention for each device. If you treat your laptop as a device dedicate strictly for work, delete all the social media apps and games from it. If you decide you want your phone to be focused on mindfulness and productivity, remove apps that don’t fit into this definition.

Delete apps you don’t use. Android makes it super easy – once you open the Play Store, go to your account, “Manage apps and devices”, and sort the by “Least used”. It’s a bit more tedious on the iPhone, where you have to go one by one and decide what to do.

Once you declutter your phone, set up your home screen to support you on a daily basis. Put apps that focus on productivity and whatever else you want and hide everything else. Make it a bit more difficult to get to your social media apps or games.

Change your wallpaper – I love having plain background, but you can use your vision board, for example. I’ve recently come across a great tip for optimising your home screen – create a page dedicated for your goals. Put your Notes app widget with list of goals or Pinterest widgets with your vision board. This way, they will serve as a constant reminder of where you’re going and what your dream life looks like.

It can be a great idea to put limits on some apps, like social media, and turning off notifications. I’ve done it ages ago, and it’s been a lifesaver! Now I unlock my phone and check apps when I want to, instead of feeling compelled to do that every time I receive a notification.

Once you’ve done with all of that, it’s time to move to a more tedious task – declutter your photos, notes, wishlists, all that kind of stuff. I’ve got over 1,500 photos on my phone that I need to go through, and I certainly don’t look forward to it. It had to be done though, so why should you wait any longer? New year is a perfect time to do cleaning also in your digital space and that’s one thing you can do to achieve that.

Don’t forget to back up your data!

Go through all the lists you can only think about. That means also your always overlooked YouTube Watch Later section and Spotify or Amazon Music playlists. We collect everything we think that might be useful later, but sometimes this later never comes. It will feel great to enter the new year with all that empty space.

Once you’re done, go through all that steps but on your laptop. Don’t forget to empty your bin at the end of a session. I recently accumulated 50GB data there which only slowed down my computer unnecessarily.

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FAQ

Is It Possible To Reset Your Life?

Sure is! Although it might look like different from what you have on mind. You can’t just press a button, rewind time, and restart your life. It would be amazing if it was possible, isn’t it?

It’s possible to reset your life in a sense of making a major life change, focusing on self-improvement, building new relationships, changing your perspective, or simply letting go of the past. My favourite way of resetting my life is going through every aspect of it, cleaning and decluttering it, as well as making adjustments to make it easier and friction-free. There’s nothing better than having simplified systems, a clutter-free mind, home, and devices, as well as organised life and business.

What Does It Mean To Reset Life?

For me, life reset means a complete do-over. The type where you look into each category of your life and perform a thorough audit. Once you have a summary of your life, see what you can change to make it easier, what habits are unhealthy and should be forgotten about, how can you become a better person, etc. Life reset doesn’t have to involve moving house or changing careers, unless you truly want it.

Final Words On How To Reset Your Life And Have The Best Year Ever

1st January is like a blank page in a brand new chapter, filled with the promise of fresh beginnings and endless possibilities. Many feel a surge of motivation, want to ditch old habits, and become the best version of themselves. New year new me, anyone?

Resetting your life isn’t necessary to become a better person, but it surely makes it easier. Removing clutter from your life can be very motivating and rewarding, not only at the end of the year.

There’s one catch, though. If you think about resetting your life, do it now. Don’t wait until tomorrow, Monday, start a new month or a year. Don’t feel you’ve missed out on an opportunity to change your life and have the best year ever just because February rolled in. Or March.

Be kind to yourself, embrace the imperfect, and focus on the process. That’s where I got it wrong so many times – I focused on the end goal and became unbelievably stressed. I didn’t enjoy the journey but rushed to achieve that goal as soon as possible, sacrificing my mental and physical health.

It wasn’t worth it.

YOLO is real – you truly only live once. Make the most out of every day.
M.