The Nine Habits to Increase Your Energy

• Napping may feel lazy, but there’s research showing it has a range of cognitive benefits. This is particularly true if you’re doing a lot of learning, since the short burst of sleep can help with memory.
• A short nap can turn you back on for work in the afternoon, when you’d normally be exhausted.
• The key is to learn how to take short naps. Wake up immediately with your alarm.

Try this: Insert a 20 minute nap after you eat lunch to recuperate your energy for the afternoon.

• The benefits here are mostly psychological. If you've gotten some important work done, your mood is more likely good and you'll feel productive.
• The other reason for this approach is that deep work isn’t always sustainable for the full workday. Better to concentrate it into a specific period than randomly insert it across chunks of time.

Try this: Make the first four hours of your morning a quiet, deep work zone.

• Set a very clear intention of how your day will go, particularly in the beginning, the night before. Visualizing your intention and writing it down into your schedule can make it happen more automatically when you wake up.

Try this: Before you go to bed, write down your plan for the next day and visualize it.

• You need to become the salesperson for your own goals. Not for other people, but for yourself.
• Part of that starts with packaging—how you frame your goals and projects can have a huge effect on your motivation. Is this something you have to do? Or an exciting challenge?

Try this: Set aside ten minutes every day to think about what today’s actions are helping you build towards.

• You don’t need to exclude friends who are going through temporarily rough times, but you should consider who you spend your time with when there are people who consistently create one-sided emotional exchanges as the basis for your relationships. Everyone needs a shoulder to cry on sometimes, but some people will expect you to be their permanent shoulder.

Try this: Set a time limit on friends who leave you feeling drained.

• The best books aren’t those that teach you facts, but those that subtly change your entire thinking patterns.
• Audio books can be very useful for this, since you can listen to them and re-listen to them on the go every day. A good book for this is one that, when you listen to it, automatically adjusts your thinking onto the things you need to work hard on.

Try this: Always have an audio book that motivates you to work on your goals.

• A lot of energy is wasted because the different parts of our lives, both internal and external, are in conflict with each other
• See how you could resolve them. Sometimes that can be done by making a quick change. Sometimes, it requires a long-term plan to escape the toxic environment, social circle or belief system that holds you back

Try this: Sit down for an hour and brainstorm all the things which assist your goals and all the things which hold you back. How could you resolve those tensions?