This post was co-written by Fifi & Neil

One of our New Years resolutions was to be more mindful, and this post is an update on how we've been getting on. We hope that by showing people what we've been up to, it might inspire others to make some positive changes in their lives too!

1. Full house deep clean on New Years Day

Yep, we're officially old and a complete embarrassment to society. Our New Years Eve was spent together drinking numerous cocktails at home and as tragic as it sounds we had a great time watching the hootenanny and dancing in the kitchen on our own! However it was a fairly early night so it meant that New Years Day was far easier to manage. In the morning we got our rubber gloves on, stuck some tunes on, and set about deep cleaning our kitchen, throwing out old junk and organising the house. It was a great way to embrace "clean house, clear mind" to start the year with a thoroughly unmuddied headspace. It's amazing what an effect it has had on the levels of calm in our home - and even better it has stayed clean! Big up to Mrs Hinch who is the woman behind getting us motivated!

2. No TV January

We did this last year and found it to be so successful we tried it again, we found that cutting out TV as much as possible for January allowed us to focus on our planning for the year ahead. Like many, we were spending between an hour or two per night watching TV. Cutting out TV made us focus on our hobbies and business bits and even gave us time to play the odd game of Scrabble - it's amazing how long your evenings feel when you cut out the escapism of TV and tune in to the real world.

3. We planned our holidays and booked the time off in advance

Fed up with the drudgery of eat, sleep, work repeat, and weekends where we just didn't plan anything, we decided to take the bull by the horns and get all of our holidays for the year entered into the calendar. We made sure that we spaced them out well so that each month we had something fun to look forward to.

4. Regular yoga and meditation

We subscribed to Sam Harris' "Waking Up" app and decided to be more regimented about meditation (rather than our previous dabblings). The beauty of the app is that it teaches you to meditate from scratch and makes you show up every day to spend around 10 minutes meditating each day. At least twice a week we have found time to do some yoga and have found that it no only made our ski holiday much easier to handle but it also has led to us being much clearer headed, we don't get regular exercise so yoga is a great way of keeping supple and using your muscles. We use the brilliant Fightmaster yoga youtube channel.

5. We started online food shopping

We realised we were spending far too much valuable weekend time doing the food shop. Between an hour and a half and two hours were spent going to the shop, around the shop and then returning home. So we joined Tescos for our food shopping and used our lunch times in the week to build our shopping list (which is surprisingly quick and easy nowadays, it's been a while since we tried it). We got a chunk of our weekend back and we can use that time to do things we enjoy or to work on our business tasks.

6. When we say we're going to do something we get it done

You know those moments when you just get fed up of things just dragging on? That thing you wanted to buy, that tradesman you need to book… All of those things start to mount up and we believe it has the same effect as having a cluttered home - it creates a cluttered mind. This year we've been focused on keeping our to-do lists clear and have found it to give us more mental space to think about the things more important to us. When something needs doing, we get it done. Fast as poss.

7. We make our bed together each morning

It's been said many times before and recently by Jordan Peterson in his book 12 Rules for Life, but if you start your day by making your bed it has been proven to put your mind in a state of achievement. Even something so small as making your bed can make a difference to your mentality, so we've both been making the bed together when we wake up and therefore we can both reap the benefits of having achieved something before 8am!

We hope this inspires you to make February a mindful month – it’s not too late to start a habit or improve your life in a small way.