With the fresh start of a new year and a new decade, you probably have some resolutions in mind to make the most out of 2020. To keep all your goals and aspirations organized, there's the Panda Daily Planner ($25), which was named 2019's best overall planner by Business Insider.

The planner is broken up into three sections, allowing you to plan out 90 days, 13 weeks, and six months. To start, the daily sections include a short morning exercise in which you write out three things you are excited and grateful for. Once you complete the exercise, you can utilize the other sections to write in the day's top priorities, schedule, tasks, and general notes. To make sure you end on a positive, there’s an end-of-day exercise to reflect on your “wins,” and what to work on for tomorrow.

The weekly sections ask you to start by reflecting on the previous week’s “big wins” and what you could improve on. After you take the time to reflect, you can fill out the “things I will do to make this week great” section, which is broken up into personal, family/friends, work, and relationships groups. There are also sections to record what you're looking forward to, habits you want to develop, something new you want to learn, and a passion project you want to find time to work on.

The monthly calendars allow you to write in notes for each day, record goals you want to achieve, and distractions you want to avoid. When the month is over, there’s a short section to reflect on what you’ve learned and insights you’ve gained. And because there are no dates, this planner is completely customizable.

When you purchase the planner, you'll also get access to e-books with titles like How to Get Your Sh*t Together in Under 60 Minutes and The Keys to a Happy & Productive Life, as well as a video series on how to utilize the planner to maximize productivity.

While there are definitely apps to help you get organized, there are numerous benefits to writing things down. To start, on paper you can keep everything in one place, which makes your to-do list easy to reference. Whereas you probably have different apps for notes, schedules, etc., meaning you're spending more time scrolling between each one. Not to mention, opening your phone for one thing is often a gateway to finding yourself on social media, which can kill productivity.

Planners are a great way to stay organized, but for some resolutions you’ll need some added inspiration to see them through. From volunteering more to reducing “activation effort,” learn some other scientific ways to achieve your goals this year.

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It’s been over a week since you emailed your colleague with an important request, and still you’ve received no response. Knowing they’re probably swamped with other things and loathing the thought of seeming annoying or rude, you type out the most cheerful, least threatening follow-up email you can come up with.

“I just wanted to check in on…” it begins.

If this situation sounds familiar, it’s probably not the only message in your outbox that includes the word just. As The Guardian points out, adding just is fine if there’s a specific reason you want your email to sound conciliatory—say, for example, you’re asking the recipient to complete a project before the agreed-upon deadline, or squeeze in one more meeting on a day that they’ve already indicated is booked.

Often, however, we use just as a way of apologizing when there isn’t really anything for which to apologize. In a LinkedIn blog post, Google’s former head of global marketing communications Ellen Petry Leanse explains that just frequently functions as a “subtle message of subordination, or deference,” thus giving the recipient more control over the conversation. And it won’t just weaken your message—it might also weaken others’ impression of you as a strong, decisive communicator.

Leanse also noticed that, on her team, women were more likely than men to pepper their messages with just. To see if striking the word would make any difference, Leanse and her team agreed to work on omitting the word whenever possible. Over time, they felt their confidence levels go up, and their communication became clearer and more direct.

Of course, Leanse’s case study is only one non-scientific example of just’s permeative impact on employees, and not every workplace is the same. But it could be worth trying a similar experiment on your own to see if a moratorium on that pesky little word has a positive effect on how others see you—and how you see yourself, too.

[h/t The Guardian]