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Develop a Morning Routine
A morning routine aims to make you alert, help you take care of your health, intellectual and spiritual growth. Develop 2 types of habits:
- Habits that can improve the quality of your life in the present
- Habits that can improve the quality of your life in the future
Ideally, you should focus to form habits that give you both — such as exercising.
MORE IDEAS FROM THE ARTICLE
We, humans, want pleasure and results as soon as possible. We start taking action, but it often happens that we fall off the wagon because we don’t see results that fast.
From then on, every morning you wake up, you should focus on the day ahead of you, to take action towards your goal(s), and achieve incremental progress.
To increase the level of your health, and by default the level of productivity, because you will be more energetic and focused:
- Get enough sleep
- Create a healthy diet for yourself
- Move more.
The main reason why this is important is because not knowing priorities, or just partially knowing them, makes us random and it takes us more time to get to actual work.
Instead of having to decide on these things in the morning and losing precious willpower and decision-making ability, map it out the night before.
All you need to do is take a big wall calendar that has an entire month on it and place it somewhere visible.
For each day that you do the positive behavior or stay away from doing a negative one, you get to put a big X on that day.
After a week or two, you’ll have a chain, and you’ll like seeing that chain of X’s, so much so that you will do almost everything you can to maintain it.
... by deconstructing tasks. Program yourself to break the task at hand into smaller pieces immediately, and just get yourself to do the first one in the sequence.
In most cases, finishing the first task will trigger a momentum, and that will make it easier to complete the remaining mini-tasks.
- Mental Distractions: Breathe and remind yourself of what is really worth your time.
- Physical Distractions: Make sure you declutter your work environment.
- Digital Distractions: Delete apps, place your phone out of the reach and turn off notifications.
- Social Distractions: Communicate your style of working to people and expectations. And use headphones.
Evaluate how well you’ve executed your plan in the previous period, so you can improve it based on the insights you’ve gathered.
Try to make it a habit just before you go to bed. Take some time to evaluate your day and see what can you do better in the morning.
RELATED IDEAS
- "A” items are most important: the things that you must do.
- "B” items only have minor consequences: tasks that you should do, but they only have mild consequences.
- “C” tasks have no consequences: they have no effect at all on your work life.
- “D” for delegate: the things that you can delegate to someone else.
- “E” for eliminate: the things you should eliminate altogether.
The biggest obstacle, the main villain hampering our productivity is always in your hands, and rarely in your pockets. _It’s your smartphone. It needs to be powered off for some time. Your laptop, clamouring for attention, is not helping either. Remove all distractions and notifications so that you can get in the ‘flow’ mode.
Creating friction between us and the open black hole of the online distractions helps us focus on work.