After gifting yourself the best book for the aspiring Chief Technology Officer, you are now wondering what you should get next. This is a wonderful time of the year, where we all get to play the “reset” switch and restart some of those initiatives with renewed vigor and hope.

Recent study by Baylor College of Medicine stated that 88% of resolutions fail within the first 2 weeks of the year, noting that the primary reason is people tend to aim too high. As tech leaders, we want to try new things and make improvements, but reality slips in, and before we know it, we’re back to dealing with the same customer fires, bug fixes, and vendor renewals as we were a few weeks ago.

Let us try instead to set expectations down to something that you can achieve that will stick. I am going to propose a handful of resolutions here that you can achieve immediately.

1. Create a shared tracking spreadsheet
   Start pulling together all the vendors you have contracts with, or all the 3rd party services your enterprise relies on.

   Have this in a single place, share it with your team, and encourage everyone to update it. Once a month, review it with the team. GSheet or Excel – don’t get too fancy.

Yes, you read right, there was only one in the list – I said I didn’t want you to overreach too quickly out of the gate. Baby steps still move the organization forward, albeit slowly, but progress is being made.

The small things can really make a large impact on your organization and overall health. Think through some of the smaller, less sexier items, that you could start doing that would really pay off dividends later on down the road.

Now, is a great time of the year to start them.