<ul><li>The best books aren’t those that teach you facts, but those that subtly change your entire thinking patterns.</li><li>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.</li></ul>Try this: Always have an audio book that motivates you to work on your goals.

Read better books

<ul><li>Make a habit of doing some pushups or burpees every day. These will get your heart pumping and blood moving, and they don’t require setting aside a lot of time from your already busy schedule.</li><li>You can add gym or fitness classes on top of this foundational habit, but this basic investment in exercise will keep you sharp when you can’t make it to the gym.</li></ul>Try this: Do at least 10 burpees every day.

Excercise every day

<ul><li>A lot of energy is wasted because the different parts of our lives, both internal and external, are in conflict with each other</li><li>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</li></ul>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?

Align your life

<ul><li>You need to become the salesperson for your own goals. Not for other people, but for yourself.</li><li>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?</li></ul>Try this: Set aside ten minutes every day to think about what today’s actions are helping you build towards.

Sell yourself on your goals

<ul><li>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.</li></ul>Try this: Set a time limit on friends who leave you feeling drained.

Get better friends

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

Set your intention the day before

<ul><li>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.</li><li>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.</li></ul>Try this: Make the first four hours of your morning a quiet, deep work zone.

Do your hard work in the morning

<ul><li>Although it might not feel like it, seven to eight hours are pretty much mandatory to stay cognitively sharp in the long-run.</li><li>For some people the sleep deprivation may have mentally plateaued. Yet, experiments showed that sleep deprivation caused continuous declines in mental performance, even though subjects felt like they were holding steady.</li></ul>Try this: Go to bed by 10pm every night, including weekends, for the next thirty days.

Go to sleep early

<ul><li>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.</li><li>A short nap can turn you back on for work in the afternoon, when you’d normally be exhausted.</li><li>The key is to learn how to take short naps. Wake up immediately with your alarm.</li></ul>Try this: Insert a 20 minute nap after you eat lunch to recuperate your energy for the afternoon.

Twenty-Minute Naps

Running out of energy too quickly? Try one (or all) of these tricks to boost it back up and get more out of your day.

Do your hard work in the morning

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Get your most important work done in the morning