Emperor Julius Caesar was responsible for the establishment of 1 January as the beginning of the new year, a long time before there was a reason for Christmas. The month was named after Janus, the two-faced god that the Romans believed looked backwards into the previous year and ahead into the future. They offered sacrifices to him and made promises of good conduct for the coming year – the original resolve.

I mentioned that I wasn’t making any particular new year’s resolutions for 2019, however that does not mean that I won’t start the year planning and goal-setting. The failure rate for new year’s resolutions can be pretty high and some of the reasons behind this failure rate is lack of planning – maybe an extra glass of champagne on New Year’s Eve leading to some form of momentary delusion, and/or not setting specific, achievable goals. I arrived back into the office after all the celebrations of Christmas and New Year’s Eve to an envelope which contained a personalised note block: ‘Amii’s to-do list’. So today I made a start on getting organised.

I am a great believer in the whiteboard, as are some of the many farmers that I follow on Twitter. I previously attended a course run by Greenfield farm, facilitated by Dr Nollaig Heffernan, which dealt with the issue of managing time efficiently with planners and using the task-prioritisation quadrant. This is a clear way of working out what needs to be done immediately, what is the most effective use of your time, or a waste of your time.

Nollaig is a great proponent of planners and since then I have been a convert to the wipe-clean version of organisation. I have large whiteboards for short-term actions, longer-term goals and calendars, so I can see the months pan out ahead of me. We use the Irish Farmers Journal black diary to book in who is collecting children from school and crèche – which in a busy week can sometimes be a bit of a juggle. Realistically speaking, if I can’t see it on a list, it can be forgotten. The realisation of something that has been forgotten can then cause agitation, so it’s best to keep the lists moving.

The ‘to-do list’ of Minister Creed and this Government in relation to agriculture is quite extensive for 2019. There is the possibility of incomprehensible damage from BREXIT, climate change targets, CAP, severe labour shortages to support the sector, as well as an income crisis and that is without any weather challenges coming to greet us this year. Within the task-prioritisation quadrant, you can focus on the top boxes in relation to BREXIT. In 2016 we were at not urgent but important, with a firm focus on staying out of quadrant one; urgent and important. This is the must-do box, which encompasses crises and problems, deadline driven projects and immediate issues – and this is now where we unfortunately find ourselves.

Like Janus, the Government must look back at where we have come from as a sector, the investment, energy and initiative put forward by our agricultural industry, which blew the targets of Food Harvest 2020 out of the water, and focus firmly on the future. It is time for action where action is possible, time to start crossing some items off the list.

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Here comes 2019 - taking each day as it comes