The New Year brings with it a sense of happiness and fresh possibilities, but it can also feel terrifying! We all tend to put pressure on ourselves to make grand personal or professional changes as the calendar resets. However, all that pressure often leads to disappointment, and unfinished goals when our vision exceeds our follow-through.
It can be difficult to embrace this "fresh start" mindset all the time - we're here to call this out and provide you with inspiration and ideas to start your 2024 on a positive - and productive - note.
Calming your New Year’s Fears
We’re throwing it back to two inspiring episodes of The Arts and Everything In Between from RECHARGE 2023 to remind you that whatever happens this year, you can face it.
Maria Fleming, CEO of Ireland's First Fortnight mental health arts festival (the 2024 edition of which is taking place this month) joined us to share her honest story of the positive that can result from the unexpected. She recounts First Fortnight's pandemic pivots - from 50% capacity limits to sudden 8PM curfews - and how she prioritised staff wellbeing over perfection. She also advocates for the importance of self care and taking care of each other - two reminders we could all take into 2024!
Join Dr. Colm Fallon of Project One Sky as he takes us on a journey of the mind, combining neuroscience, psychology and meditation, to teach us how important self care is for the short and long term health of self. You’ll learn how cognitive load and stress can create a volatile mix and more importantly how consistent meditation practice can help ease these burdens, but also help foster a growth mindset and healthier overall habits.
Bringing Positivity to Productivity with Ticketsolve
January means it's time for the annual onslaught of productivity buzzwords and tips. Conversations around time management, goal setting, and optimization can leave us feeling stressed or pressured to completely overhaul our habits overnight. However, productivity doesn’t necessarily mean added stress or pressure. At its core, working on productivity simply means taking the time to think through your processes and tools to determine what helps you get into a flow where you can get things done efficiently
For arts and culture organisations, productivity could look like:
- Scanning efficiencies
- Optimising the customer check out page
- Using fast payment tools such as Apple and Google Pay
- Making scanning quicker and easy with Google Wallets
- Auto reports
And the GREAT news is… we’re just about to launch our next big feature as part of new models of functionality available to Ticketsolve Community members…. Keep your eyes peeled here.
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The tools for success
As the new year starts, we’re reflecting on our successes in 2023. Many of these were facilitated by a tool we’ve come to love here at Ticketsolve, namely, Objectives and Key Results or OKRs. OKRs are a goal-setting framework that aligns entire organisations around shared priorities. The Ticketsolve team have seen first-hand how OKRs boost productivity and team morale and motivation.
To give you a detailed insight into what OKRs are, and how they can be implemented within your organisation, we’ve created a new guide to Getting Started with Objectives and Key Results, which you can access here. The guide shares learnings from our experiences so you can see how they might benefit your organisation, too.
It offers practical advice on building your own OKR model, developing timelines and evaluating your progress. Follow its recommendations to integrate this adaptable framework into your existing workflows. For the ultimate helping hand, we’ve even produced a worksheet that you can use as a starting point.
