Start with Intention
Start each day early, start each day with a clear, actionable plan. There is no time to waste sleeping in and no reason not to be focused and locked in from your first moments awake. Your best today starts with the planning you did yesterday. Start with intention, start with purpose, start early!
Make Use of the Extra Time
The reason for starting early is not necessarily so you can jump into the work day and responding to emails first thing. Instead consider having a nutritious breakfast, some exercise, meditation or time spent reviewing educational materials. If you give yourself enough time, there is no reason why you can’t get to all the things you need to. Being productive is finding balance and giving your mind, body and spirit what they need to function at their best.
Nourish Your Body
Your body and its ability to heal itself are literally everything. If you want to feel your best, you need to nourish yourself with healthy and satiating natural foods. Consider cutting out junk food, reducing alcohol and limiting tobacco use. Nourish your body and your mind will be more free to function at it’s highest levels.
Work Up a Sweat
Frequent strenuous exercise will allow your body to regenerate and heal itself faster. Additionally setting and achieving goals around physical fitness will allow you to more actively work towards benchmarks in your professional life.
Work Towards a Clear Purpose
What are you really chasing? What is your ultimate goal? The more you focus your attentions and work towards clear, singular, definable ends the easier it will be for you to align yourself towards achieving that purpose. Know yourself, know your goal, know what you are chasing!
Commit Yourself to a Master Plan
Successful goal setting means being clear about the purpose you are working towards but also setting your ideas down, frequently assessing your progress and redesigning your game plan as necessary. The clearer you can be about writing down, thinking through and redefining your ongoing goals, the better you will be set up for the success you seek.
Set and Work Through a Daily Plan
Your master plan is the set of overarching medium to longer term goals that you are working though. Using this, concoct clear daily plans, to-do lists and reassessments of your progress towards your master plan. The more you can get into the mindstate of logical, goal based planning, the more productive you will be.
Know the Value of Your Time
Think long and hard about how you spend your time engaged with work, hobbies, play and your personal life. Think about if you are devoting yourself to the things that really matter. Always strive to get the most out of every moment, opportunity and day. Productive, successful people never waste a moment. It doesn’t mean they are always working, it means they are always using their minds and time wisely.
Value Your Resources
Holding on to your resources and strategizing efficiently around spending money will translate into other areas of your life. The mentality that saves and uses what it has effectively is the same one that is able to lean into adversity and make the hard decisions when they count.
Give Yourself Time to Pause
Working from sunup to sundown and perhaps late into the evening is sometimes necessary when you are crushing a massive project. Keep this kind of breakneck pace up and you will quickly burn out. Give yourself the rest you need in each and every day. Work smarter, not harder. Around the middle part of every day think about taking a longer pause to eat, meditate, exercise or all of the above. When you go back to work you will be rejuvenated and refreshed.
Absorb Mind Expanding Content Regularly
As the saying goes, “use it or lose it”. The more you can be in the habit of learning new skills and refining the ones you already have, the more you will be driven to work harder and achieve more. Spend rigorous amounts of time reading and studying things that can get you closer to where you want to go. Knowledge is power and the more you harness it, the more effective you will be.
Take Chances
Risk and rewards matter. The more you allow yourself to take calculated risks at the right times, the better you prepare yourself for success. Victory favors the bold, don’t get caught in self doubt and apathy. These are the true killers of dreams. Set your mark and achieve it!
Connect with the Winner’s Circle
Spending time around people who are productive and high functioning is the best way to capture that energy and cultivate it in your own life. The people you surround yourself with can have a huge impact in the choices you make and things you aspire to. Align yourself with success, mastery and wisdom.
Balance, Balance, Balance
Digging in and getting the job done is important but no goal is worth driving yourself into the ground. Learn to be able to know when you need time to yourself, time to refresh, time to eat healthy food, see your family, exercise or just step away from your computer. Being able to strive for and achieve balance in your work life relationship will make it much easier for you to lean into the tougher moments and demands. It is better to take several short breaks to refresh yourself then to wait until you are physically and mentally broken. Give yourself the things you need to succeed.
Live in Service
Give assistance to the people around you. Offer your talents and expertise. Share the time you have with those who can benefit from what you know and can do. You won’t just feel great doing it, you will build a stronger and more cohesive network of support for the times when you could use a little extra push. Everyone you encounter has something to teach you and something to assist you with. Be open minded, giving and grateful.
Cancel Out Mindless Distractions
For some of us it could be television, for others, impulses around drugs, alcohol or sexuality. The bottom line is, if you are wasting a lot of your time chasing mindless pleasures or rocking the couch to watch hours of entertainment, you are wasting time you could be using… more productively! Think about how to expand your mind, nourish your body and enrich your spirit. These things will sharpen your senses, mindless distractions weaken them.
Forget Luck
Nothing ever happens by chance. Hardwork and dedication yield results and sometimes there are more or less favorable variables at play. Stop thinking that those who reached a certain point did so because of luck. Stop wishing that you had better or more favorable odds. Work with what you have and achieve success on your own terms. Forget luck, never forget perseverance!
Build Human Intelligence
Being able to work well with other people is one of the true hallmarks of success. The more time you spend getting to know how and why you react to certain people and their behaviors, the more you will learn about how to harness and control your own emotions. The goal should not be to limit emotions but to understand them. To have a better sense of who you are and your connection to those around you.
Be an Open Vessel
There is a good chance that there is a great deal of information which could be useful to you on a daily basis except you are either too stuck in your own thoughts or too busy acting, speaking and engaging to realize. As an open vessel, you know the value of listening and watching. You are open and engaged with the world around you. You realize that there is something to learn and understand in every waking moment in life. 7:
Don’t Quit
Just because it seems impossible or you face uncertain challenges, dig in and know that great men and women have come before you, had less and achieved more. Uncertainty and doubt are often pathways to success. They are undervalued but the are necessary for growth and transformation. True innovation is often borne of true heartbreak and pain. Sometimes you need to think you are right and be wrong before you can realize what it takes to be right. Dig in and make it happen!
