New Year's Resolutions - 7 Articles to Boost Your Inspiration

I have never been big on New Year's resolutions. Seeing articles over the weekend about New Year's resolutions people are making, however, prompted going back to see what Brainzooming blog articles could help with some of the more common types of New Year's resolutions. If you are resolving to improve your productivity (especially with social media), career, and stress levels in the new year, here are seven articles to help you get started with your New Year's resolutions:

Get Organized and Improve Your Productivity

Social Media Productivity

To get the most from your social media time investment, try balancing your efforts between listening, participating in others’ social media outlets, and creating content in your own social media hangouts. Whenever you create content, make sure to use it in as many places as possible. Check out these 13 ideas for improving your social media productivity.

Weaning Yourself from Too Much Time on Social Media

Backing away from social media involves coming to grips with not trying to see, read, review, and reply to everything zinging around within your virtual social network. These nine tips point to the importance of using your social network to cover your gaps and let you off the hook on knowing everything going on as it happens.

Improve Your Career

Taking Care of Your Own Professional Learning at Very Low Cost

There is no excuse for not seeking out professional development, even if there are not many dollars available for it in your company's budget. These 10 ideas are relatively low cost and you can implement them throughout 2012 to keep you sharp professionally at a very reasonable investment.

Be a Better Business Networker

I will readily admit that being a better business networker is not one of my strengths. Networking situations are a challenge for me, so these five tips are as much about making it easier for the other person to be a better business networker as they are about making you more effective. What is nice is everyone benefits from applying them in real life networking situations!

Creating a Personal Social Media Presence to Catch up with Everyone Else

Yes, there are people who have not fully exploited social networks to display their talents and help them in their careers. This video overview highlights 11 steps to jump-start your social networking presence with an eye toward highlighting your career experience. The one addition I would make to the video is building in a step for a concentrated Facebook effort as another way to tap your personal network in your career pursuits.

Improving Your Leadership Skills

No big surprises here, but it is still a tough list of ideas to carry out: it is all about honesty, integrity, focusing on helping others, being distinctive. If you really display all these, however, you will definitely stand out in today's workplace.

Managing Your Stress Levels

Staying Out of Negative Situations

This list started life as a post for a friend who needed to check out and get out of a variety of not only non-productive, but also emotionally taxing situations. It was either get out of them or start losing a sense of his identity. Those types of situations are bad, yet we all face them.  - Mike Brown