9 good daily habits to increase productivity.
The 9 good daily habits are not something that you can perfect in one day. It will take time and skyrocket your productivity. Your self-esteem will increase and it will definitely lead you to live a happy and successful life.
If you are looking for a quick and easy solution for your life problems then I would warn that you are wasting your time here. This website is not the one.
There are no easy ways to have an abundance of wealth, have better relationships, have better health, and become a better person.
Trust me on this. There are no shortcuts.
Quality demands a high price and if you’re looking for a quality life make sure you are ready to pay the price.
Some of you may not like some of the habits but, hey, it is your life. You are free to choose whatever you like, but learning something is not going to harm you. Maybe after reading the description you will understand the habits better.
Let’s begin.
The 9 good daily habits are:
1. Joining the 4 am club
I am not a morning person because I am a night owl and I can focus more at night. What the heck is sunrise?
These are some of the lines we say when thinking of waking up early. Maybe not the last one.
My friend Joy was not a morning person either and his productivity was pretty good. When he says he is not a morning person that doesn’t mean he wakes up at 9 am, or 10 am, or 11 am.
No Sir. He wakes up at 2 pm or sometimes at 3 pm and goes to sleep after sunrise.
He is productive but there is something he is missing.
He is depressed from inside. He is less energized every day. He is not having a good relationship with his girlfriend. He remains moody most of the time.
He finds that somehow the day slips by without notice and no matter how much he remains busy he can not finish much of his work.
Changing sleep schedule:
So, one day he decides he will change his sleeping habit and try to wake up in the morning by 6 am. But he goes to bed at 6 am and how could he change his whole routine. That seems impossible.
So, he decides he will wake up every day half an hour early. Usually, he wakes up at 3 pm, but the next day he will wake up at 2:30 pm and after that at 2 pm.
It went like this and he starts to find himself sleepy early too. The first few weeks were rough, most of the time sleep-deprived and someday he thought maybe this wasn’t a good idea.
But after 20-30 days his sleeping schedule starts to change. He could find sleep easily by 11 am and wake up at 6 am. Also, he has better sleep.
So, one day motivated by this, he decides to wake up at 5 am. That was even more difficult than changing his whole sleeping schedule but what happens next is unbelievable, he decides to wake up at 4 am.
When Joy starts waking up early he finds more energy during the day, more focus on his work, and because of that he can accomplish more in less time.
Also because of that he had more time to spare with his girlfriend, and also because of that, he is happier and more motivated to wake up early. All linked.
Try to join the 4 am club for only a few weeks and see the benefits for yourself. There is no harm in doing that.
2. Meditation
The second in the list of good daily habits is meditation. There are various kinds of mediation but here we will talk about mindful meditation.
If you ask me what is the one thing that you can harness to have an incredible life, I will say harnessing the power of staying in the present.
Mindful meditation teaches us that. It focuses on the very moment and has a neutral effect on all the other matters of your life.
What happens in mindfulness:
You are here. You are reading these sentences, this particular word, this particular alphabet. You are either sitting or lying on your bed on this day, this year and you are here on this earth. You are not in the past nor in the future but in this very moment.
A lot of things happened to you, a lot of things are gonna happen to you but you are not concerned about what happened or what will happen. You are only concerned about this very moment.
You are trying to focus on something but various thoughts occur to you at the same time. Did you switch your gas off, did you send the mail, should you text your crush because she didn’t reply yet.
At this point in time, just look at it from a third person and see what these thoughts make you feel. What kind of feeling you are feeling. If you focus on your breath what is there that makes you astray from your breath.
If someone makes you angry, what is this anger, what it makes you feel? Think from a third person.
You are water in a pond. There is a protective shield around the pond. All the bombs can try to penetrate the shield but it will fail.
The water of the pond will remain calm and no matter how many cries, firing, agony goes out in the outside world, they cannot stir the water. Mindfulness is one of the daily good habits to practice.
The benefits of mindfulness are endless and I will write a different blog for it because this is getting too long.
3. Exercise
The Brigham Young University researchers found in a study that people who work out in the morning remain more active and energized during the day.
If you work out in an empty stomach in the morning you will burn more fats because of low insulin levels in your blood. Moreover, another research found that you will lower your blood pressure.
There are numerous benefits of working out early in the morning but here we are concerned about our productivity or psychological benefit.
A physical workout doesn’t have to be a 3 hours gym workout, it can be 15 minutes home workout or 15 minutes yoga.
This small amount of body movement will release happy chemicals or in other words, neurotransmitters, like dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, etc in your brain and you will feel elevated and happier in the morning.
This will be a great start for your day and this effect will last during the whole day because you will accomplish your task one after another for having those doses of the happy chemical once again. It is a kind of chain.
Exercise should be a must in your good daily habits list.
Try it for yourself and see the result.
4. Organized Tasks
I have mentioned it as organized tasks not organizing tasks. It is in the past form because what you are going to do for the day should be organized the day before when you go to bed.
One of the good daily habits to increase productivity is to make a list of the tasks you’re going to do the next day. You don’t need to mention the quantity of time required to complete your tasks, but only the tasks you are going to do.
Example:
Let us understand this with the example of Joy’s organizing of tasks.
Joy makes a whole listing of tasks he was going to complete the next day.
He wrote he will meditate for 1 hour, exercise for 1 hour, then he will work on his novel like 3 hours and after that, he will focus on writing his article for his blog channel for 4 hours and after that, he will read novels for like 6 hours.
He goes to sleep with a happy face and the next morning at 4 am he wakes up with a jump and takes out his list.
Looking at the big list of tasks makes him feel a little overwhelmed but that is okay he can do it. Our willpower works best in the morning.
He completes his meditation and exercise but when he starts to write he thinks that he has to write for 3 hours and after that work on his article for 4 hours. That is a lot.
He starts, writes like half an hour and then he is tired, willpower is wearing off and becomes a little bit depressed. Unsatisfied with his writing for his novel he starts his article. Same result and more depressed. The whole day ends in complete fiasco.
The next day he doesn’t write the amount of work he is going to complete, he just writes what he is going to do according to his priority. That completely changes his life which is the next habit of this article.
5. Tiny start
From the next day Joy plans to work on his novel for only 100 words. That was too easy and it would require less willpower. Moreover, while he writes, he stops thinking about completing the 100 words or 3 hours. He only focuses on the current sentences.
He learns to do this by practicing mindfulness.
While doing it, something remarkable happens to him. He not only writes 1500 words or 3 hours of productivity, but the quality of writing is much better.
Habit creation:
One of the daily good habits is to start tiny. You don’t need to plan for a 9 hours productivity for the next day, or a plan to complete your big project in the next three months. Focus only on the next five minutes.
If you want to create a new habit, focus on working on it for only 5 minutes. The trick is you will need less willpower to start your work and after starting you will find intrinsic motivation to continue it further.
Someday you may not find that intrinsic motivation but it will be a small repetition to create a new habit which will help in the upcoming days.
If you work for 5 minutes for 21 days, that is not going to do anything to you except you can increase that 5 minutes to 10 minutes. The starting will be slow but over time it will create a big difference in the upcoming days.
I will talk about this in detail in my next blog about how to form a new habit where you don’t find any motivation for it.
6. Calculation
One of the good daily habits is calculating everything you do in a day. Noting down how much time you have spent in a particular task and how much money you have spent on that day. In short noting down all the things you do on a day will make you more aware and conscious.
We are creatures of habit and we do a lot of things without even thinking. The subconscious brain makes decisions for us because of our existing habits.
You can say you are productive but perhaps all you did was remain busy. Remaining busy is not the same as productivity.
Working for your boss that you don’t like is not productivity.
If you write everything down and analyze it at night or after a week you will be shocked to find how much time you have wasted on unproductive work and how much you could have accomplished.
This small habit will make you more productive and efficient over time.
Try it for a week. There is no harm.
7. Eating healthy and less
I don’t need to tell that eating healthy food should be one of good daily habits. There are numerous articles on the benefits of eating healthy food.
I am not going to explain to them but I am going to explain the effect on productivity for eating healthy and eating less.
Eating healthy definitely gives us the necessary nutritions to perform our daily tasks and have a healthier body and brain. But, people who are addicted to junk, high-calorie food find healthy food less tasty.
Joy’s brain is shaped for high calories foods like crispy chicken, burgers, pizzas, fries, or gravies steeped in oil.
He still didn’t gain much weight despite eating all this food, lucky Joy some would say, but what happens is whenever he eats tasty food he doesn’t feel like working on his task after eating.
Obviously, bad food creates physical problems like obesity, low energy, risk of cancer, diabetes, heart failure, weak bones, and muscles and this would come later in his life, but now he couldn’t work well or focus on his work after eating.
Dopamine effect:
What happens is whenever he thinks about tasty food to eat, dopamine spurts in his brain, when he eats it, more dopamine spurts, when he is finished, again dopamine spurts.
The release of happy chemicals in not continues, it spurts then it stops, and depending on the quality of trigger the spurts can be more or less. Things related to love, sex, and food, our brain spurts more dopamine than other activities.
Our brain spurts more dopamine on things related to survival. Oily food has high calories, and high calorie is good for survival. The brain doesn’t know the difference between healthy and unhealthy food, it looks for things which give us a dopamine boost.
Once the dopamine is released in high quantities, small work that gives delayed gratification doesn’t concern our brain much until our brain starts crying for dopamine again.
If you want to learn more about happy chemicals, you can read the book:
Meet your happy chemicals by Loretta Graziano Breuning, Ph.D.
To increase our productivity, we should be concerned about how we use our dopamine spurt which is our next topic.
8. Effective Utilisation of dopamine
The secret to productivity or success is the effective utilization of our dopamine release or the other happy chemicals.
To be productive in anything we need inner motivation. If we don’t feel like doing it, despite having strong willpower, we will fail every time.
Inner motivation comes when there are happy chemicals released in your brain.
If you train your brain to receive these chemicals from social media, youtube, adult websites, or games, then your brain will not look for things that give you delayed gratification or a lower spurt of chemicals.
Moreover, the higher release of dopamine damages your dopamine receptors and for which you don’t feel motivated for doing any work. This leads to Parkinson’s disease.
You have damaged your basal ganglia, the subconscious part of your brain by masturbating on adult movies or doing drugs.
If you close all the sources of releasing dopamine in your brain, then your brain will start crying for it. You can give the chemicals to your brain by your productive task. You will not like it in the beginning, but after a few months, you will love it.
This process is not easy because your brain has already wired for bad habits. Rewiring takes time and patience.
I wrote this in detail in the following article:
9. The bed is your friend but only after 9 pm
If you are waking up at 4 am, then try going to bed after 9 pm will another one of the good daily habits. During the day, stay away from it, as much as possible.
You can rest on it but never work on your bed. I don’t have any particular study to prove this but this is from my personal experience.
There are days when I am very productive, but once I decide to work on something from my bed, then it is all over. I work for five minutes, hug my pillow, and sleep for 10 minutes. I again work like 10 minutes, sleep like 30 minutes.
Moreover, I am not as much focused in a bed as much as I am focused on a table and keeping my spine straight.
They say be comfortable when you start doing something, but comfortability is in mind. Remember the pond, nothing can harm you or make you uncomfortable.
Finding the perfect comfortability is uncomfortable and you can be more focused when you are awake and alert.
Uncomfortable keeps us awake and alert.
This last habit is from my personal experience and is kinda biased, so, you can try and see if it is true or not, or you can work on the bed.
Let me know at: admin@basicideaz.com
Conclusion
The one thing I could say that is more important than all of the good daily habits is a productive mentality. You should have goals, dreams in your life.
You should have an attitude toward achieving your goals. If you don’t know how to do it then you should have a mentality of learning most of the ways to achieve it.
The point is, try to improve yourself every day. One percent at a time.
Hal Elrod quoted in his book, The morning miracle, “Your level of success, will rarely exceed your level of personal development, because success is something you attract by the person you become,”
Goodluck
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