Happy New Year! Are you a New Year’s resolution kind of person? If so, we’ve got some tips for you on how to start off strong. And even if you’re not into specific time-bound resolutions, it’s all still good advice.

Begin each day with a tailored to-do list

Here’s some advice for those who want to be more productive at work this year. (And, really, who doesn’t want that?)

One key, says Carter Cast, a clinical professor of strategy, is to start your day with a to-do list that’s tailored to your most important goals and your own working style.

“Decide which tasks will really move the needle for your organization, and focus on those first,” Cast says. “You can’t treat every task or message in your inbox equally.” Also, Cast says, “Do your most important work when your brain is working well. For me, that’s early morning. I turn into a zombie around 4pm.”

So if you work most effectively before noon, for instance, that is probably not the best time to spend on noncritical administrative tasks. Turn off your email alerts, keep your phone at a safe distance, and reserve these hours for the projects that matter the most to you and your organization.

Be sure to plan out in advance how you will use this time, Cast warns. Otherwise, “the tail ends up wagging the dog. Remember that, by and large, your inbox is composed of other people’s agendas, not yours.”

(For more advice from Cast on helping your team and yourself manage stress, check out our The Insightful Leader Live webinar with him on January 20. Get more info and register here.)

Stay motivated to pay off debt

Reducing personal debt is a common New Year’s resolution. Yet it’s a daunting endeavor and it can be hard to know where to start.

One approach is to begin by paying off the debt with the highest interest rate, so that you keep your interest payments as low as possible. But marketing professor Blake McShane wondered if another strategy, known as the snowball method, might better motivate people to keep whittling away at their debt.

He and a coauthor tested the idea that debtors would have more success if they paid off small debts first. Because they can be paid off more easily, this approach might create a sense of success that spurs the person to keep at it.

They tested their idea using data from nearly 6,000 clients of a debt-settlement firm, each of whom had multiple accounts to pay off. They found that, indeed, the number of accounts an individual had paid off (as a fraction of the total number of accounts) better predicted successfully completing the program than the dollar amount paid off (as a fraction of the total dollar amount).

The idea is that starting small “could motivate you, because you check something off your list,” says McShane. “It can make you think that you might actually have it in you to complete the whole thing. ‘Hey, I’ve achieved this! I wasn’t sure whether I could do it, but I’ve got one, so maybe I can get them all.’”

Know when your resolve can lag

It is no accident that the new year gets us thinking about starting out strong: research suggests that people put a lot more emphasis on doing things correctly at the very beginning and the very end of a task.

“Actions at the beginning and end of a sequence appear to reflect more on our own personal standards than actions in the middle,” says Maferima Touré-Tillery, an associate professor of marketing.

So it stands to reason that the reverse is also true: you’ll be more forgiving of yourself if you slack in the middle of a given task.

Touré-Tillery and a coauthor demonstrate this in a series of experiments. In one, they recruited 98 coffee drinkers who were shown a “buy 9, get the 10th free” punch card with either one, five, or eight holes punched. Then they were asked to imagine that they had been on a “coffee detox” in an effort to cut back on their caffeine. How bad would they feel about themselves if they nonetheless gave into their temptation to buy a caffeinated coffee?

Participants who gave in in the middle of their punch card felt better about succumbing to temptation than those who did so at the beginning or end of their card.

So if you already have a strong start under your belt, it is important not to get overly confident.