Practically, that means this: You might work for 50 hours a week, but if you don’t experience any growth personally, emotionally, or financially, you’re not effective.

Results Matter The Most

If you don’t measure your time, it’s tough to stop procrastination or improve your productivity. Because if you want to manage your time better, you have to know where it goes first.
The specific method you use for your activity log doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that you want to keep a record for at least two weeks. Preferably, you want a whole month of recorded activities.

To Stop Wasting Time, Know Thy Time

Go through all the recurring activities in your log one by one. What would happen if you would stop doing them?<ul><li>If the answer is: “All hell breaks loose.” Don’t change anything.</li><li>But if your answer is: “Nothing would happen.” You’ve hit gold.</li></ul>We all do activities that have ZERO returns. There are the time-wasters.

Identify The Non-Productive Work

That’s how you stop wasting time. Know where your time goes. Identify the critical tasks from the trivial tasks in your life. And cut the trivial, time-wasting, tasks.
Often, we start time-wasting activities, and they become habits. And if you don’t become aware of the pointless behavior, it’s difficult to break those bad habits.

How You Stop Wasting Time: Eliminate The Time-Wasters

A productive life equals happy life. But we insist on wasting time, which makes it hard to live a productive life.

I think that a productive life equals happy life. But we insist on wasting time, which makes it hard to live a productive life.

productivity

Productivity

timemanagement

Time Management

How To Stop Wasting Time and Improve Your Personal Effectiveness

Every building needs a sturdy foundation. Your daily habits are a foundation on which you are building who you are—your values, goals, personality, etc.If you track your daily habits, you may be surprised to find a collection of suboptimal habits: you may not be reaching your full potential.One of those suboptimal habits is being easily distracted.Distraction erodes your day-to-day life and diverts your resources toward things that don’t really matter. If you’re not equipped to manage distraction—if you’re not indistractable—your brain will be manipulated by time-wasting diversions.

Habits and Distractions

<ul><li>Mastering internal triggers</li><li>Making time for traction</li><li>Hacking back external triggers</li><li>Blocking out distraction</li></ul>Remember: Distractions are things that push us away from what we want most in life.

The Four Pillars to Becoming Indistractable

All behaviours, both traction and distraction, are prompted by triggers, both internal and external.Internal triggers cue us from within. When we feel our belly growl, we look for a snack. When we’re cold, we find a coat to warm up. And when we’re sad, lonely, or stressed, we might call a friend or loved one for support.External triggers are cues in our environment such as the pings, dings, and rings that prompt us to check our email, answer a phone call, or open a news alert. External triggers can also take the form of other people, such as a coworker who stops by our desk to chat.

Internal And External Triggers

Distraction, it turns out, isn’t about the distracting thing itself; rather, it’s about how we respond to it.Resisting, ruminating, and finally giving in to the desire perpetuates the cycle of distraction and quite possibly drives many unwanted behaviours.While we can’t control the feelings and thoughts that pop into our heads, we can control what we do with them. We can manage distractions that originate from within by changing how we think about them.

Mastering Internal Triggers

Step 1: Look for the discomfort that precedes the distraction, focusing on the internal trigger.Step 2: Write down the trigger.Step 3: Explore your negative sensations with curiosity instead of contempt.Step 4: Be extra cautious during liminal moments when you transition from one activity to another.

Handling The Distraction

We can change the way we see ourselves to get rid of self-limiting beliefs. If we believe we’re short on willpower and self-control, then we will be. If we decide we’re powerless to resist temptation, it becomes true. If we tell ourselves we are deficient by nature, we will believe every word.

Adjusting Our Vision

Being indistractable is largely about making sure you make time for traction each day and eliminating the distraction that keeps you from living the life you want—one that involves taking care of yourself, your relationships, and your work.Planning your time with intention is critical, even if you choose to spend it scrolling through celebrity headlines or reading a steamy romance novel. After all, the time you’ve planned to waste is not wasted time.

Making Time For Traction

Unwanted external triggers hamper our productivity and diminish our well-being. While technology companies use cues like the pings and dings on our phones to hack our behaviour, external triggers are not confined to our digital devices. They’re all around us—from cookies beckoning when we open the kitchen cabinet to a chatty coworker keeping us from finishing a time-sensitive project.

Hacking Back External Triggers

<ul><li>Work interruptions</li><li>Email</li><li>Group chat</li><li>Meetings</li><li>Smartphone</li><li>Computer desktop</li><li>Online articles</li><li>Online feeds</li></ul>These interruptions lead to mistakes and steal your time from what you should be focused on. It’s time to block out those distractions.

The Top Contenders

The last step to becoming indistractable involves preventing ourselves from sliding into distraction.To do so, we must learn a powerful technique called “precommitment,” which involves removing a choice in the future to overcome our impulses in the present.Precommitments are the last line of defence preventing us from sliding into distraction. You should only use this after the other three indistractable strategies have been applied.

Blocking Out Distraction

You can prevent distractions with effort pacts, which makes unwanted behaviour more difficult to do. You can also make a price pact, which involves putting money on the line to encourage you to do what you say you will. Finally, an identity pact is one of the most effective ways of changing your behaviour since it involves changing your identity—your image of who you are.

The Pacts

We live in a distracted world. Don't Look Up!

Overcoming distraction is the struggle of our time. Here are 4 simple steps to manage your wandering mind.

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

habits

Habits

The 4 Steps to Becoming Indistractable

When your team communication is working as it should within your small business, every employee knows what to expect, enabling them to plan and respond accordingly as things develop throughout the day. If, on the other hand, the messaging from management is unclear, no one is sure if a task has been completed or not, and only certain employees have an idea of what the status is of a project at any given time, it is very difficult to run a successful company.
Your messaging needs to be clear so that your employees understand what is expected of them and their coworkers.

Keeping Everyone On The Same Page

With effective team communication, employees feel more comfortable talking to management about issues they are having at work, which can in turn lead to improved employee retention and productivity.It’s important to remember that every worker within a company has individual likes, dislikes, and work styles that should be respected and addressed by management.

Relaying Employee Needs

We’ve all had the experience of walking into a store or business and wondering how they are still open: employees at the front desk are unable to answer any customer questions, orders have been lost, and these poor workers have to email or call multiple different colleagues to get a satisfactory answer about anything. The problems in such businesses boil down to one ultimate issue: ineffective team communication.These companies need to create an environment where transparent communication is encouraged.

Improving Customer Experience

Whether your small business prefers to use email messaging or other means of communication, all that matters is that the information is clear.It can be incredibly frustrating to work in a team where work is being done twice, tasks are not being addressed at all, and team communication is generally poor.Happy, efficient employees are the most important part of your company. These are the people who are going to carry out the tasks necessary to ensure that your small business remains profitable in an increasingly competitive world.

Clear and Easy To Follow Communication

Team communication leads to easier and more effective collaboration, resulting in a better final product. When one person is working on a portion of a project by themselves with no collaboration, it’s undeniable that they will get less done in a given time period than they would when collaborating with a team.

Improving Collabortion

Email messaging is one of the greatest communication tools we have developed, but also one of the most irritating. Throughout the work day, a single employee can literally receive hundreds of emails. Some of these are important and need to be responded to, while others are redundant and it would have been better if they were never sent at all. If your team communication is clear and understood by everyone involved in the company, you can eliminate at least a few of these extra email notifications that fill your employees’ inboxes throughout the day.

Eliminate Useless Emails

For effective business communication, you need a unified communication system that can combine all your team communication from emails, chats, calls, documents in cloud storage, and to-dos in one app and organize them based on topic or context. So, whenever you want to refer to any conversation or file, you should be able to retrieve it in a few seconds.

Unify Team Communication

In the age of email messaging, cell phones, and all of the other ways we can now interact with others; team communication within a small business seems like it should be better than it’s ever been…

communication

Communication

teamwork

Teamwork

business

Business

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

7 Reasons why team communication is important for small businesses

Fatal Assumption: If you understand the technical work of a business, then you understand a business that does technical work. This is simply NOT true.
A technician who tries to start a business will take the work he loves to do and turn it into a job.

The Entrepreneurial Myth

We are all three people at the same time:
<ul>
<li>The Entrepreneur is the visionary. The dreamer. The catalyst for change. To the Entrepreneur, most people are problems that get in the way of the dream.</li>
<li>The Manager is pragmatic. He plans, organizes, and compulsively clings to the status quo. It is the tension between the Entrepreneur’s vision and the Manager’s pragmatism that creates the synthesis from which all great works are born.</li>
<li>The Technician is the doer. He is happiest working in the current moment. He believes that thinking isn’t work; it gets in the way of work.</li>
</ul>

The Entrepreneur, The Manager, and The Technician

The owner and the business are one and the same thing. Without you, the business would not exist.Infancy ends when the owner realizes that the business cannot continue to operate if you do it all yourself. At this point, you either close the doors or move on to adolescence.Remember: The purpose of going into business is to get free of a job so you can create jobs for other people.

Infancy: The Technician’s Phase

Many small business owners get another technician to help.But then they manage by abdication, rather than by delegation. The owner gets some of their time back as they give a new help more responsibility. But over time, the quality of the work begins to slip. Suddenly you realize that nobody really cares about your business the way that you do, or is willing to work as hard.

Adolescence: Getting Some Help

Every adolescent business reaches a point where it pushes beyond its owner’s Comfort Zone – the boundary within which he feels secure in his ability to control his environment, and outside of which he begins to lose that control.When this happens, many technician-turned-business-owners “get small” again. They get rid of what they could not control. They go back to infancy.You eventually find that you don’t own a business – you own a job.Other adolescent businesses will continue to grow faster and faster until they self-destruct from their own momentum.

Reaching The Boundary

You have to prepare yourself and your business for growth. To educate yourself sufficiently so that, as your business grows, the businesses foundation and structure can carry the additional weight.The key is to plan, envision, and articulate what you see in the future both for yourself and for your employees. Because if you don’t articulate it – write it down clearly – you don’t own it.A Mature company is different from an Adolescent company in that it starts differently. It is founded on a broader perspective of building something that works not because of you, but without you.

Building A Mature Company

<ul><li>Entrepreneur asks “How must the business work?”</li><li>The entrepreneur sees the business as a system for producing outside results – for the customer – resulting in a profit.</li><li>He starts with a picture of a well-defined future, and then comes back to the present with the intention of changing it to match the vision.</li><li>He envisions the business in its entirety, from which is derived its parts.</li><li>The present-day world is modelled after his vision.</li></ul>

Entrepreneurial Perspective

Has less to do with what’s done in ta business and more to do with how it’s done. The commodity isn’t what’s important – the way it’s delivered is.It understands that without a clear picture of that customer, no business can succeed.The business is the product.The customer is always an opportunity.

The Entrepreneurial Model

<ul><li>McDonald’s calls itself the “most successful small business in the world” because that’s exactly what it is.</li><li>The Business Format Franchise proves the franchisee with an entire system of doing business.</li><li>The true product of a business is the business itself.</li><li>Ray Kroc, the founder of the fast-food chain, understood that at McDonald’s, the hamburger wasn’t the product. McDonald’s was.</li><li>You need a systems-dependent business, not a people-dependent business.</li></ul>

The McD Revolution

The Franchise Prototype is the place where all assumptions are put to the test to see how well they work before becoming operational in the business.It is the answer to the perpetual questions, “How do I give my customer what he wants while maintaining control of the business that’s giving it to him?”A Business Format Franchise is a proprietary way of doing business that successfully and preferentially differentiates every extraordinary business from every one of its competitors. In this light, every great business in the world is a franchise.

The Franchise Prototype

Your business is not your life. They are separate things.Pretend that the business you own – or want to own – is the prototype, or will be the prototype, for 5,000 more just like it. Perfect replicas.Great businesses are not built by extraordinary people but by ordinary people doing extraordinary things. But for ordinary people to do extraordinary things, a system – “a way of doing things” – is absolutely essential in order to compensate for the disparity between the skills your people have and the skills your business needs if it is to produce consistent results.

Working On Your Business, Not In It

<ul><li>Must provide consistent value to your customers, employees, suppliers, and lenders, beyond what they expect.</li><li>It will be operated by people with the lowest possible level of skill.</li><li>It will stand out as a place of impeccable order.</li><li>All work will be documented in Operations Manuals.</li><li>It will provide a uniformly predictable service to the customer.</li><li>It will utilize a uniform color, dress and facilities code.</li></ul>

Rules to Follow

Building the prototype of your business is a continuous process:<ul><li>Innovation</li><li>Quantification</li><li>Orchestration</li></ul>The franchisor aims his innovative energies at the way in which his business does business.The entire process by which the business does business is a marketing tool, a mechanism for finding and keeping customers.The business is the product, and how the business interacts with the consumer is more important than what it sells.

The Business Development Process

Innovation continually poses the question: What is standing in the way of my customers getting what he wants from my business?Innovation is the mechanism through which your business identifies itself in the mind of your customer and establishes its individuality.

Innovation

<ul><li>Orchestration is the elimination of discretion, or choice, at the operating level of your business.</li><li>Orchestration is the pursuit of producing a consistent, predictable result in the world of business.</li><li>If you haven’t orchestrated it, you don’t own it.</li><li>A franchise is simply your unique way of doing business. And unless your unique way of doing business can be replicated every single time, you don’t own it.</li></ul>

Orchestration

Your Business Development Program is the vehicle through which you can create your Franchise Prototype.7 Step Process:<ul><li>Primary Aim</li><li>Strategic Objective</li><li>Organizational Strategy</li><li>Management Strategy</li><li>People Strategy</li><li>Marketing Strategy</li><li>Systems Strategy</li></ul>

Your Business Development Process

What would you like to be able to say about your life after it’s too late to do anything about it?If you were to write a script for the tape to be played for the mourners at your funeral, how would you like it to read?Create an intentional life.As with Mature companies, I believe great people to be those who know how they got where they are, and what they need to do to get where they’re going.Great people have a vision for their lives that they practise emulating each and every day.They go to work on their lives, not just in their lives.

Your Primary Aim

<ul><li>What do I wish my life to look like?</li><li>How do I wish my life to be on a day-to-day basis?</li><li>What would I like to be able to say I truly know in my life, about my life?</li><li>How would I like to be with other people in my life – my family, my friends, my business associates, my customers, my employees, my community?</li><li>How would I like people to think about me?</li><li>What would I like to be doing two years from now? Ten years from now? Twenty years from now? When does my life come to a close?</li></ul>

Before Starting, Ask Yourself

<ul><li>Your Strategic Objective is a very clear statement of what your business has to ultimately do for you to achieve your Primary Aim.</li><li>Your business is a means rather than an end, a vehicle to enrich your life rather than one that drains the life you have.</li><li>When creating standards for your Strategic Objective always ask yourself: What will serve my Primary Aim?</li><li>The first standard of your Strategic Objective is money, the gross revenues. How big is your vision? How big will your business be when it’s finally done?</li></ul>

Your Strategic Objective

When is your Prototype going to be completed? In two years? Three? Ten?Where are you going to be in business? Locally? Regionally? Nationally? Internationally?How are you going to be in business? Retail? Wholesale? A combination of the two?What standards are you going to insist upon regarding reporting, cleanliness, clothing, management, hiring, firing, and so forth?

Other Strategic Objectives

<ul><li>You cannot organize a company around personalities. You must organize around accountabilities and responsibilities.</li><li>Start with the org chart.</li><li>Separate shareholders from employees. Remove yourself from the business.</li><li>Imagine all of the positions that your company will need when it’s complete. All of the accompanying responsibilities. </li><li>Then fill in each position with the employees that you have – even if that means you must take on more than one job title.</li></ul>

Your Organizational Strategy

<ul><li>A Management System is designed into your Prototype to produce a marketing result.</li><li>You want it to be as automatic as possible.</li><li>It must be effective at finding and keeping customers.</li><li>An operations manual is a series of checklists.</li></ul>

Your Management Strategy

<ul><li>The work we do is a reflection of who we are.</li><li>There is no such thing as undesirable work. There are only some people who look upon their work as a punishment for who they are and where they stand in the world, rather than as an opportunity to see themselves as they really are.</li><li>Make sure people understand the idea behind the work that they’re being asked to do.</li><li>The customer is not always right, but it is our job to make them feel that way.</li><li>Everyone who works here is expected to work toward being the best she can possibly be at the tasks she’s accountable for.</li></ul>

Your People Strategy

<ul><li>Never figure out what you want your people to do and then try to create a game out of it.</li><li>Never create a game for the people you’re unwilling to play yourself.</li><li>Make sure there are specific ways of winning the game without ending it.</li><li>Change the game from time-to-time – the tactics, not the strategy.</li><li>Never expect the game to be self-sustaining. People need to be reminded of it constantly.</li><li>The game has to make sense.</li><li>The game needs to be fun from time to time.</li><li>If you can’t think of a good game, steal one.</li></ul>

Rules of the Game

<ul><li>How we do it here</li><li>How we recruit, hire and train people to do it here</li><li>How we manage it here</li><li>How we change it here</li></ul>

The Hierarchy of Systems

<ul><li>What your customer wants is all that matters. And what your customer wants is probably significantly different from what you think he wants.</li><li>Demographics and psychographics are the two essential pillars supporting a successful marketing program. If you know who your customer is – demographics – you can then determine why he buys – psychographics.</li><li>You must ask your customers about who they are. Send out surveys and questionnaires. Reward them for completion.</li><li>You must be sensitive to the science of marketing art. You have to be interested in it.</li></ul>

Your Marketing Strategy

<ul><li>You can build systems for hard systems, soft systems, and information systems.</li><li>Hard systems might be the colors, letterhead, and tools that everyone uses.</li><li>Soft systems include the way you do things and how you communicate.</li><li>Information systems are the data that is recorded, organized, and used for decision making.</li></ul>

Your Systems Strategy

An instant classic, this revised and updated edition of the phenomenal bestseller dispels the myths about starting your own business. Small business consultant and author Michael E. Gerber, with sharp insight gained from years of experience, points out how common assumptions, expectations, and even technical expertise can get in the way of running a successful business. Gerber walks you through the steps in the life of a business—from entrepreneurial infancy through adolescent growing pains to the mature entrepreneurial perspective: the guiding light of all businesses that succeed—and shows how to apply the lessons of franchising to any business, whether or not it is a franchise. Most importantly, Gerber draws the vital, often overlooked distinction between working on your business and working in your business. The E-Myth Revisited will help you grow your business in a productive, assured way.

entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

startup

Startups

books

Books

The E-Myth Revisited

The holidays are coming, and savvy owners should take this opportunity to draw as much traffic as possible to their sites and — most importantly — convert as much of that traffic as possible to customers while they’re there.
During the holidays, business spikes for nearly everyone, but e-commerce has been growing each year over the brick-and-mortar competition — and the pandemic has only increased this growth. In 2020, retail e-commerce sales skyrocketed, with a 35% year-over-year increase over the 2019 season in the United States.

Preparing Small Business Owners For The Holidays

Email still remains one of the most effective marketing tools available to businesses — especially small businesses, where owners need to make their dollars stretch.
In today’s crowded marketing space, the email statistics are staggering:
<ul>
<li>There are 4 billion daily email users.</li>
<li>An average open rate of 19.8% and click-through rate of 11.3%.</li>
<li>Four out of five marketers say they’d rather give up social media than email marketing.</li>
</ul>

Email is Huge

Email marketing tools offer a range of features to help businesses utilize email more effectively and automate as much of the process as possible.There are two major players in the small business email marketing space: MailChimp and ConvertKit. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, but the general advice tends to be that MailChimp is better for e-commerce stores, while ConvertKit is better for creators.

Tools For Email Marketing

The customer experience (CX) on your site can be the difference between a satisfied customer and a tick on your bounce rate. As you prepare for the holiday surge, make sure you take some time to consider the customer experience on your website and any other storefronts you have.For an e-commerce store, CX starts and ends with your online shopping experience.

The Customer Experience

There are tools available that can help you create a better experience for your customers, with no coding knowledge required.Dialogue uses AI and natural language processing to track and analyze customer behaviour in real-time. Dialogue helps e-commerce store owners remove friction and give customers a truly personalized shopping experience.

AI Tools To Provide Better Customer Experience

Getting the right emails to the right customers at the right time is important. So is providing an excellent customer experience. However, if the shoppers come to your e-commerce store and leave empty-handed, you may need to work on your conversion optimization.Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of adjusting your site to maximize the conversion rate.Unbounce is a whole suite of tools to help business owners optimize their websites for conversions.

Optimizing Landing and Sales Pages

The holidays are coming, and that means increased opportunities for many owners of e-commerce small businesses to draw as much traffic as possible.

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

3 Tips For Ecommerce Small Business Owners to Prepare for the Holidays

<ul><li>Planning. Planning the week to come on good days gives you a better chance of getting something done on the bad ones because it means you don't have to make a decision when you're not feeling up to it.&nbsp;</li><li>Outlining and brainstorming. Consider using your good days to brainstorm or outline your projects, so you can focus on the execution on the bad days.</li><li>Writing snippets. If you set up a snippet manager and spend some time writing snippets ahead of time, you can respond to routine messages with less thought. It's a small thing, but being able to easily respond to a few routine messages on a bad day can really help build momentum for other tasks. Snippets make that easier.&nbsp;</li><li>Automating things. Automation is a habit, and a good day is a great time to work on it. Spend your good days building bots, so they can work for you on the bad days..</li></ul>

Use your good days to plan for the bad ones

Why you should use the good days to plan

The body replaces itself with a new set of cells every seven to ten years. This has been discovered by Swedish molecular biologist, Dr. Jonas Frisen.When it comes to aging, our DNAs remain the same from the day of a cell's birth throughout its lifespan, however, most new atoms are taken in through the air we breathe, the food we consume, and the liquids we intake.

Body Rejuvenation

Medical professionals and scientists think that various cancers grow in the human body when cancerous cells replenish through division. Through chemotherapy, it wipes out a wide range of cells indiscriminately without particularly focusing on the source of cancer.Hopefully, shortly researchers will, pinpoint cancer originators and block those cells from duplicating without interfering with other healthy cells.

Cell Renewal and Cancer

The body renews itself at varying paces, for example, the lifespan for the following:<ul><li>The skin rejuvenates every 2-4 weeks;</li><li>The hair, about six years for women and three years for men;</li><li>The liver rejuvenates every 150-500 days;</li><li>The stomach and intestines, every five days due to corrosive acids;</li><li>The bones take a full 10 years.</li></ul>

The Cell's Lifespan

<ul><li>The eye's cornea can regenerate itself in as little as one day, but the lens and other areas don't change;</li><li>The cerebral cortex stays with us from birth to death. </li></ul>

Cells That Never Leave

Does your body really replace itself every seven years? Find out at HowStuffWorks.com

health

Health

scienceandnature

Science & Nature

Does your body really replace itself every seven years?

It is the feeling that your brain just won't function properly. People will describe it as brain fog. You can't concentrate, and simple tasks take too long. You find that the things you could do in a short time in the morning now take forever.
Mental fatigue can be acute or chronic. Acute fatigue can be relieved after a short period of rest. If allowed to continue, it can become chronic fatigue and eventually lead to burnout.

Describing mental fatigue

Contributing factors to mental fatigue are poor nutrition, lack of sleep, hormonal imbalances, or cognitive overload. Cognitive overload can take the following forms:
<ul>
<li>When you focus on a single task for an extended period of time.</li>
<li>When you spread your attention across too many things.</li>
<li>Worrying about tasks. It is as mentally taxing as doing the task.</li>
</ul>

Causes of mental fatigue

Your brain is fuelled with the same food as your muscles. What you eat has an enormous impact on your cognitive functioning.
<ul>
<li>Cut down on refined sugars as it decreases alertness. Aim for sustained energy levels throughout the day.</li>
<li>Plan your meals in advance. If you wait until you're hungry, you're already low on energy and willpower and will reach for a quick energy boost in the form of sugar.</li>
<li>Don't skip breakfast. Without it, you may likely crash in the middle of the morning. Eat more eggs, yogurt, and oatmeal to sustain your energy levels until lunch.</li>
<li>Snack mid-morning and mid-afternoon to give your body consistent fuel. </li>
<li>Stay hydrated with water. Mild hydration can negatively impact cognitive performance.</li>
<li>Listen to your body to figure out what makes you feel best. The same nutrition advice won't work for everyone.</li>
</ul>

Give your brain high-quality fuel

The quality of life decreases when we don't get enough sleep. To improve your quality of sleep:
<ul>
<li>Keep it cool, dark, and quiet. A temperature between 65 and 72 degrees Fahrenheit (18-22 degrees celsius) is recommended.</li>
<li>No screens before bed. The blue light of screens interferes with your body clock.</li>
<li>Have a calming bedtime routine. Doing the same winding down routine before bed prepares your body and mind for the night.</li>
<li>Keep a consistent wake-up time. Your natural body clock is more aligned with the time you wake up than the time you fall asleep.</li>
<li>Skip coffee after noon. Caffeine has a half-life of 4 - 6 hours.</li>
</ul>

Sleep is the most productive thing you do all day

Your body has natural ebbs and flows in energy throughout the day. Those are your ultradian rhythms. They are driven by your hormone levels, metabolic processes, and cardiovascular functioning and affect your energy, mood, and cognitive functioning. They are unique to you.
These rhythms take the form of 90-minute peaks of energy followed by a 20-minute dip that repeats throughout the day. As the day progresses, the peaks get lower and lower. Plan your day to work with your ultradian rhythms. Take a week to note your energy levels throughout the day. Notice when your energy levels are highest and lowest.

Work with your ultradian rhythms

Your energy levels will naturally decrease throughout the day, but you can recharge your batteries by taking breaks.
<ul>
<li>High performers work for fifty-two minutes, then take a seventeen-minute break.</li>
<li>Taking a five-minute walk every hour boost energy levels and sharpens focus, one study finds.</li>
<li>Social breaks are more effective at reducing stress and improving mood than cognitive breaks or nutrition breaks.</li>
<li>People who take short walks outdoors return with better moods.</li>
<li>Tech-free breaks increase vigor and reduce emotional exhaustion.</li>
<li>A 20-40 minute power nap in the afternoon has been shown to improve alertness and mood.</li>
</ul>

Take strategic breaks

<ul>
<li>Only touch things once. As soon as you reach for something, whether it's mail or a project that needs to be filed, do it immediately.</li>
<li>Set aside 2 - 3 specific time-blocks to process your emails.</li>
<li>Focus on one thing at a time.</li>
<li>Identify which decisions you can do with little thinking. Eat the same breakfast; keep the same exercise routine.</li>
<li>Learn to say no. More responsibilities will increase the mental load on your brain.</li>
</ul>

Ways to lighten your mental load

It is helpful to have a work shutdown ritual - a consistent series of tasks that tell your brain that it can stop thinking about work for the day:
<ul>
<li>Update and organize your to-do list. Your brain can stop thinking about the tasks knowing that you won't forget about them.</li>
<li>Schedule a commitment at the end of the day to put you out of work mode - a dinner with friends or a group fitness class.</li>
<li>Turn off all notifications from work apps on your phone or delete work apps from your phone.</li>
</ul>

Disconnect at the end of the workday

Identify the root causes of mental fatigue and take steps to manage, with strategies for sleep, excercise, and building your workday around energy levels.

Mental Fatigue: What to Do When Your Brain Is Too Tired to Think Straight

A chronotype is what a person's sleep cycle calls under, whether they're a night owl, an early bird, or somewhere in between.
One's chronotype is determined by a combination of nature and nurture. Respectively, one's genes determine whether one prefers to be awake late at night or early in the morning; whereas nurture is how we choose our lifestyle.

The Sleep-Wake Cycle

What you participate in or what your daily activities are are usually what reinforces your chronotype.

Sleep Habits: The Environment's Role

<ul>
<li>Make the change gradually. Don't let your body go into shock. It is preferred if you set your alarm 15-20 mins earlier for the past several weeks until your adjusted to your ideal schedule.</li>
<li>Consistency is key.</li>
<li>Limit exposure to light an hour before bed because it blocks the body's production of melatonin.</li>
<li>Avoid stimulating activities during the time you should be asleep.</li>
</ul>

Changing Your Sleep Cycle

Can you train yourself to be a morning person?

Can a night owl turn into an early bird?

Being in a bad place mentally is extremely difficult when going through it alone, however, the good thing about the modern world is it offers three main sources for solace:
<ol>
<li>Psychiatric medicine</li>
<li>Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT)</li>
<li>Psychotherapy.</li>
</ol>

The Modern World's Solace

When administered correctly, the medicine we get from our psychiatrist helps correct the chemical imbalances of our brain that help us get through our daily lives. 
The side effects of these may range from nausea to sleepiness, but with it, we'd be able to function... more or less.

Psychiatric Medicine

These are psychiatric sessions that last around 6 to 10 hours where we learn techniques to argue rationally with our irrational mind. 
Our internal persecutors like paranoia, low self-esteem, shame, and panic, will be tackled. We'll then be able to distinguish facts from irrational thoughts.

Cognitive Behavior Therapy

At a first glance, it seems like psychotherapy is not an option you'd like to get yourself involved in since it requires a large amount of your time, active engagement, and sustained emotional efforts. 
However, psychotherapy is a great way to correct our self-ignorance in the most profound ways. It provides a safe space to let ourselves heal consciously.

Psychotherapy

<ol>
<li>We are able to make our unconscious feelings become conscious. Since experiencing trauma we are unable to grasp what we truly long for. We learn here crucial ideas and feelings that come from our unconscious to be exposed and healed.</li>
<li>Transference. Here we learn where our impulses come from and develop less self-defeating ways of interacting with people moving forward.</li>
<li>It is most likely our first good relationship. The therapist is the first truly supportive and reliable person we've encountered.</li>
</ol>

Why Psychotherapy Works

Why Psychotherapy Works - Articles from The School of Life, formally The Book of Life, a gathering of the best ideas around wisdom and emotional intelligence.

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