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Getting organized is one of the most popular promises people make to themselves as they enter the New Year. But how can you keep your resolution instead of being part of the 92% of people who make them and fail?

Keep in mind that "a little better is a little better," says Fay Wolf, author of New Order: A Decluttering Handbook for Creative Folks (And Everyone Else). "Small steps are more likely to stick than trying to do over everything," she says.

Here are five things you can do to get organized and be more productive in 2016:

It's finally December, and you've worked hard all year long. You wrote enough emails to fill a novel. You spent an average of seven hours a day on your computer. And, if you were working full-time, you probably spent 42 hours of your life battling traffic during your daily commute.

Whoa. If anyone deserves a chance to kick back and relax, it's you!

But as tempting as it may be to spend the rest of December curled up with a big mug of cocoa, a snuggly blanket, and a never-ending Netflix queue, you probably want to avoid hibernating all month long.

Regardless of whether your job status is employed or unemployed, you shouldn't underestimate the importance of getting a jump-start on your career in the year ahead in the final days of the month.

Use the next few weeks wisely so that you can finish 2015 feeling clear, focused, and organized when the year comes to an inevitable close. (If you're job hunting, this is an especially good time to get your ducks in a row because January is one of the best times to apply for a new job.)

Here are 20 career-boosting action steps to complete before the clock strikes midnight on New Year's Eve.

Imagine the colleague with whom you have a very challenging relationship, the person who makes the most innocuous conversation tense and uncomfortable. Regardless of the topic, this person opposes you and approaches things as an adversary rather than an ally.

Once you can visualize that person vividly and even viscerally, imagine the following scenario: You’re sitting at your desk working away when a message from that person pops up on your screen. You open the message and it reads: “I got the draft presentation you sent. I caught a couple of mistakes, and I have some ideas for how to make it better. I’ll drop by your office at 3 PM to discuss.”

When confronted with a problem, or better yet, before it becomes a problem, leadership consultants Bob Anderson and Bill Adams recommend organizational leaders first turn inward to drive lasting change.

Over the past decade, we’ve studied the impact of a wide range of management practices on different dimensions of organizational health.1 This analysis, based on surveys of more than two million respondents at over 1,000 companies, has become a stable baseline for understanding the incremental contributions of specific organizational and leadership characteristics to the health, positive and negative, of the companies in our sample.

We’ve long inquired into the processes and structures that reinforce organizational stability. But from November 2013 to October 2014, we added questions, for the first time, on speed and flexibility. Our goal was to discover how often leaders and managers moved quickly when challenged and how rapidly organizations adjusted to changes and to new ways of doing things.

A little more than two years ago, Stanford GSB lecturer and serial board member David Dodson conducted an informal survey of company board members. He queried CEOs as well as the members, and compiled a list of best practices for these advisory panels.

No one likes opening bills. Especially not when they remind you of the credit card payment you either forgot or couldn't afford to make the month before. Now you're hit with an insulting interest rate on top of your balance, plus penalty charges. The interest rate amounts to highway robbery, you think, and what's worse is that everything compounds. You wish you’d never opened up the account in the first place.

Tim Carr, an American working for a defense company based in the midwestern United States, was about to enter a sensitive bargaining session with a high-level Saudi Arabian customer, but he wasn’t particularly concerned. Carr was an experienced negotiator and was well-trained in basic principles: Separate the people from the problem. Define your BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) up front. Focus on interests, not positions. He’d been there, read that, and done the training.

Chances are you’ve heard a friend complain about having to "manage up." The act of managing up is often cast in a negative light — an inappropriate act of having to cover for a manager who would have otherwise let things fall through the cracks.

But just as managing down to a team is a complex responsibility that requires much practice, so is managing up. Both are essential skills for career development, and both are far more involved than simply delegating work or picking up an extra project.

Accomplishments are based on actions, not on thoughts--yet the thought is always father to the deed. Achievement starts with an idea, a perspective, a point of view, or even just an attitude. (Ideas, perspectives, and points of view like these, for starters.)

Here are some of the things extraordinarily successful people say every day--and how those statements spur them to take actions that lead to even greater success:

After writing my last column, an overview of the very disheartening book called Leadership BS, I practically had to wipe my tears off of my keyboard. The book’s author, Jeffrey Pfeffer, presents research to demonstrate that the business environment encourages aberrant leadership behaviors — selfishness, immodesty, lying, and so on — in spite of their negative impact. And, during my interview with Pfeffer, he squelched my dream of a conscious capitalist utopia when he stated his belief that companies routinely named the best places to work because of their open, honest, and transparent environments will continue to be the exception rather than the rule. “Leaders will trade off money and performance for ego, power, and control” time and time again, he told me.

But now that I’ve had some time to get over the shock of having my hopes dashed so summarily, my tears have dried. And, upon reflection, I have to respectfully disagree. In the fight for talent, the current dismal state of employee engagement is no longer tenable. Furthermore, there are too many “best of” exemplars of companies that are doing things right and turning a profit at the same time for firms and leaders to rationalize their bad behavior as “just business.” I believe we can, want, and must to do better.

Do you care about your job? No, you know, really care.

Do you care so much that you will defend your company's product at dinner parties when someone mentions that it snapped in two on first use?

Or do you mumble: "Yeah, we cut back on manufacturing costs for a little more profit. You can't blame us, can you?"?

I muse on this because there's a certain trend for companies to take themselves a little more seriously. By "more seriously" I mean focusing on something other than pristine clean lucre and the CEO's large cut of it.

Something akin to a larger purpose, for example.

This means that in hiring staff, they're increasingly looking for people who are able to have -- or even have naturally -- higher goals than mere money-making.

A retired Scottish footballer and a Silicon Valley venture capitalist don’t seem like the likeliest of friends and collaborators. But Alex Ferguson, the long-time manager of the ultra-successful Manchester United team, and Michael Moritz, the chairman of Sequoia Capital, have more in common than you might suspect.

Ferguson, whose team won 38 trophies in the 27 years he coached, and Moritz, an early investor in Google, Yahoo, and Airbnb, have both thought long and hard about the art of management. Together they’ve written a book on the art of management — Leading: Learning from Life and My Years at Manchester United — that distills the lessons in leadership Ferguson learned while heading the world’s most successful sports franchise.

It's party season. After that comes conference season, and then summer workshop season, then another conference season, and then party season again. At all these events, as well as many occasions in-between, you're going to meet, or spy across the room, someone you really want to talk to. Only you won't be quite sure how to start the conversation. 

Starting a conversation with a stranger can be daunting, but it really isn't that hard. There are really only three rules: Be pleasant and upbeat; be open and straightforward; and say something the other person will want to hear. 

With that in mind, here's are some conversation starters guaranteed to get things rolling. After that, it's up to you.

As 2015 winds down, most executives likely have turned their attentions to ensuring a fast start to the new year. They must prepare their teams to be sure-footed amidst uncertainty regarding economic conditions, geopolitical tensions, technological developments, and more — including the added complication of a U.S. presidential election. They need their organizations to be confident, nimble, and relentless in their shared commitment to excel.

So how can you as a leader bring this preparation to your enterprise? It certainly isn’t through top-down directives or yet another attempt to craft the perfect organizational structure. Business today is too fast-moving and complex for those options to work. Instead, leaders must master the duality of focus and agility. That is, there must be unity up, down, and across the enterprise on shared objectives, along with great flexibility to seize opportunities and overcome obstacles.

Leadership is a constant fight for what you stand for and what you seek to achieve for the betterment of yourself and the healthier whole. Do you have the self-trust to endure the journey? The belief in yourself not to be derailed by others who may doubt your intentions? The preparedness to stay the course or course-correct – and not lose faith, focus, and hope along the way?

Leadership is about putting yourself to the test; knowing how much you can stretch your thinking and that of your colleagues, challenging your core beliefs during times of uncertainty, and staying true to yourself when the pressure seems insurmountable. As a leader, it’s about having the wisdom to know what your experiences have taught you.

A recent study concluded that gender inequality is costing the global economy $12 trillion annually, with North America accounting for 25 percent of that total followed by China’s 20-plus percent.

If diversity and gender equality have so much potential for improving business, why don’t we see more of it faster? What will be necessary to make it happen?

There are several kinds of responses to this question. The first is the “do it yourself” response, characterized by Sheryl Sandberg’s now-famous argument in her book, Lean In. Among other things, she challenges women to change their behaviors, to bolster their self-confidence and ambition, and become better job and wage negotiators while choosing a partner who can help share the load of a career.

Although a lot of people are reminded to be thankful on Thanksgiving, gratitude shouldn't be reserved for special occasions. Showing just a little appreciation for what you have could greatly improve your life year-round. Here are nine powerful ways gratitude can change your life:

I used to work a lot — 60, 80, or even 100 hours a week.

I let my work be a big part of how I defined myself. I wore those insane hours like a badge of honor . . . I loved telling people how "busy" I was and how much I "had to do".

Sound familiar?

Looking back, I realize I used my work to try and fill a void in myself. The problem was that this void was like a black hole. No matter how many hours I worked, it never seemed to fill it up. If anything, it made me feel worse.

One day I’d had enough. Truth be told, I’d had way more than enough. I stopped and reevaluated my life, trying to figure out what was important to me, and what wasn’t.

I had to make a big change. I had to figure out how to work smarter, not harder. I needed to optimize my work process to do more in less time.

I needed the Pomodoro Technique. Here’s how this incredible simple time management system changed my workday—and ultimately, my life. I think it can do the same for you.

When people ask you what you’re doing over the holidays, they typically mean outside of work. And without question, travel plans, budgeting, shopping and even weather are probably on your mind too.

But the end of the year is also a time for tasks ranging from seasonal initiatives to the work you’re expected to do day in and out (regardless of the presence of holiday music in your local stores). So, here are some easy ways to increase your focus in the office in November and December.

In the last 10 years, authenticity has become the gold standard of leadership. This is a sea change from 2003 when I wrote Authentic Leadership. Back then, many people asked what it meant to be authentic. Authentic Leadership was intended as a clarion call to the new generation to learn from negative examples like Enron, WorldCom and Tyco. In it, I defined authentic leaders as genuine, moral and character-based leaders: "People of the highest integrity, committed to building enduring organizations … who have a deep sense of purpose and are true to their core values who have the courage to build their companies to meet the needs of all their stakeholders, and who recognize the importance of their service to society."

Gender equality in leadership is a topic appearing with increasing frequency among the research reports, books, and opinion pieces crossing my desk. Perhaps one reason is the candidacy of women for the Presidency of the United States in both parties.

Whatever the reason, research is shedding interesting insights on the issue. Findings of a recent McKinsey Global Institute study include: (1) lack of gender diversity is associated with a greater likelihood of below par performance in a sample of 366 companies in Canada, Latin America, United Kingdom, and the US, and (2) when companies commit themselves to diverse leadership, they are more successful.

One response to the research is to disagree with the premise and methodology. Studies like these can be easy targets. Three hundred sixty-six companies spread across a number of countries is a small sample. Although gender and financial data are straightforward, they are not always easy to obtain with complete accuracy. And, like many studies, these correlate gender diversity with financial performance. That is, they are found together. But that doesn’t mean that gender diversity necessarily accounts for much if any of the performance.