5 Personal Productivity Habits That Ease the Day
Simple Steps to Calm Our Work & Home Lives
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Well-considered habits and personal productivity go hand in hand. Whatever our work and whatever our daily tasks may be, finding ways to simplify and organize our mental chatter, fitness, to-do lists, home, and work lives is beneficial. Go-to strategies to ease and organize how, when and where we invest time and energy involve well-considered routines and habits.
Habits are often associated with limiting rules but in truth, habits are the OPPOSITE of limiting. Well-considered habits are all about ease, simplification, and automaticity. Habits lead to routines, and routines reduce the hundreds of daily decisions we face. Work toward adopting the most effective habits of highly-productive people by enlisting the following:
Create Enjoyable Mornings — Use the first minutes of the morning to set a tone by meeting and greeting the day with gratitude and peace. Make the morning yours by creating a routine that includes phone-free quiet and a period of relaxed putter time.
Make a List with a Tough-Stuff-First Mindset — Highly productive people plan the day to come the night before, and they identify just 2 to 3 items they’ll address. Bullet-pointing our to-do’s provides a helpful visual from which we prioritize one to three items that will be completed or advanced by the end of the day.
Cultivate Single-Task Deep Work — When it’s time to work, be dressed, set up to perform, with distractions removed. Be a professional who shows up independent of mood, with focus on detail, craft, and caring. Success is liking who you are, what you do, and how you do it. Do good work in blocks of time, and take breaks. The body and mind benefit from opportunities to refresh throughout the day.
Manage your Energy and Your Time — Productive people use energy as a metric to gauge what to do and when. They understand that time is a non-renewable finite resource. They are deliberate in the way they use time by scheduling, guarding, and prioritizing professional engagements, exercise, social commitments, family time, rest, and rejuvenation. Use your calender as your big rocks and don’t-do list to protect your focus, time, and energy.
Learn to Say No - People routinely categorize tasks and events that are not obligations as obligations. They underestimate, over-promise, and often overdo. Determine what works for your wellness, priorities, career, and family, and politely decline invitations, commitments, and requests when it’s time to do so.
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Productivity fuels our careers, focus, energy, and confidence. Strategies listed here represent go-to ways high-achievers address and manage their work and themselves.
While people sometimes consider habits to be limiting, in truth habits are all about freedom, ease and automaticity. Habits lead to routines, routines lead to systems, and systems move us from productive to highly-productive, from success to high success.