As I tweeted yes­ter­day morn­ing, I have only one res­o­lu­tion for 2011: work hard, and get rewarded. Per­haps it sounds more like a mantra than a goal, but I think it has a lot of value.

Through­out our lives, we work. We work for sat­is­fac­tion, for pay­ment, for food and for shel­ter. Some of us work for some­thing to do. Most of us work because we have to. Very few of us stay at home and do noth­ing all day; even after retire­ment, plenty of peo­ple con­tinue to work in one form or another. Our lives are bound up in work. It can be joy­ous or crush­ing. It can make the rest of our lives easy, or leave us liv­ing from pay­check to paycheck.

The key to work, and to life, is to throw your­self into it and to get rewarded for doing so. Ide­al­is­tic? Sure. But I believe that it’s true, too.

When I talk about rewards, I don’t just mean cash. Sure, I want to make a few extra quid as much as any­one else; in fact, one of my goals this year is to orga­nize my finances and get started in the world of invest­ment. But rewards come in many guises, not least of which is job sat­is­fac­tion. There’s lit­tle bet­ter than com­ing home from a long day with the feel­ing of a job well done, of value, of worth, of know­ing that your boss appre­ci­ates your work—and so do you. I want both kinds of reward: finan­cial and emotional.

But how can the desire to be rewarded fit in to the cat­e­gory of “New Year’s Res­o­lu­tion”? We have some mea­sure of con­trol over our job sat­is­fac­tion, but surely the level of finan­cial reward is a deci­sion for our employ­ers alone to make? I couldn’t dis­agree more.

First of all, never for­get that your job and your salary are not for­ever fixed. A hard worker is valu­able to their employer, what­ever cat­e­gory they fall into, and you should always make sure that you’re paid what you’re worth. That said, this of course requires that you are a hard worker. But beyond this, if you stay with your cur­rent job then think about find­ing ways to take on more respon­si­bil­ity. Be more involved. Be more impor­tant. Work harder, be appre­ci­ated, and when the salary review comes around you’ve got a great bar­gain­ing chip to get your­self a raise.

If your job doesn’t inter­est you, that’s fine: do some­thing on the side! You can work hard at any­thing from a side busi­ness to a stu­dent soci­ety. You can vol­un­teer some time for a local char­ity or a non-profit organ­i­sa­tion. You can start a blog, or become an ama­teur pho­tog­ra­pher. There pos­si­bil­i­ties are end­less, and impor­tantly, each one has the poten­tial for both emo­tional and finan­cial reward. I’m not the first to talk about mak­ing more money from side projects and I won’t be the last.

So what’s the plan? I’ve writ­ten myself three key messages.

1. Work hard in your day job, and get a good raise at your annual salary review.
   This will keep me focused, keep my job sat­is­fac­tion at a high level, help me progress through the com­pany, and will ulti­mately make my daily life more reward­ing. To boot, any increase I can get when the salary review comes around will ulti­mately stand me in good stead for the future: raises have resid­ual ben­e­fits and will boost your income for many years to come.
2. Stop being lazy when it comes to per­sonal finance.
   Last year I let my sav­ings sit in a 0% inter­est account because I didn’t get around to start­ing a new one. I let a Cred­i­t­Ex­pert trial run on for months after I’d checked my score because I couldn’t be both­ered to can­cel it, wast­ing almost £50. No more. This year, I’m going to just get on with the small finance tasks—and I expect that doing so will make me hun­dreds of pounds in inter­est and saved fees over the course of the year.
3. Don’t stop when you achieve your goals. Don’t stop when you fail. Per­se­vere.
   I’ve got a slew of projects—some of which have been rum­bling on for years, some of which are still cooking—and any num­ber of them could be mak­ing me money on the side. They’re not. Why? Either because I suc­ceed, stopped and let them dwin­dle, or because I never found a way to suc­ceed in mon­e­tiz­ing them and I gave up try­ing. Nei­ther is a good course of action. If I pick a project with poten­tial and work hard on it, I’ll reap the benefits.

I’m sure that these three mes­sages could ben­e­fit plenty of peo­ple beyond my desk. And though they’re sim­ple, they have the poten­tial to make a real dif­fer­ence. It all comes down to my sin­gle New Year’s Res­o­lu­tion for 2011, and one I intend to keep: work hard,  get rewarded.

What’s your plan for 2011? How would you work towards achiev­ing my res­o­lu­tion? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.