3 Steps Successful People Take To Make Their Day Productive
Have you ever had days that you regretted spending time on unimportant activities such as binge-watching YouTube videos?
Yep. So have I. Feels like YouTube is winning the battle of temptation with their smart video recommendations to get you hooked for hours without hesitation. This especially happens during my breaks while working from home when I told myself I will only watch one video.
Seeing success so far away makes me wonder how do successful people cope with frequent distractions from their work daily. After many article searches, recommendation evaluations, and self-motivational prep-talks, here are the main steps to take to get your productive days back.
Step 1 – Build a Morning / Night Routine
“You’ll never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.” — John C. Maxwell
What do Michelle Obama, Jack Dorsey, and Richard Branson have in common?
Their jobs and lifestyle are clearly different, but they do make a point to exercise once they get up before starting their day doing their respective jobs. Exercise leads to the secretion of neurotransmitters that promote mental clarity and an improved attention span, giving us better focus on our objectives.
I adopted a 7-minute workout every morning at 7 for a couple of months now, and the results really do pay off. I feel livelier and more energetic to work on my daily tasks, which makes me less prone to get distracted and take more breaks in between.
I am not advocating that exercise is the way to go. Exercise works for me as I am physically fit and my work is a desk job. A door-to-door salesman probably does not want to drain his energy physically right before starting his work.
There are many other activities you can adopt in your morning or night routine. Meditation and Mantra Recitations help to clear your mind from stress and anxiety for enhanced awareness if done in the morning, and better sleep if done at night. You can pick a hobby to do to unwind such as reading. Bill Gates reads for one hour before bed to improve his sleep, and so does Warren Buffet.
Choose an activity that activates or relaxes your body or mind. The key to unlock the benefits from the activities you pick is to be disciplined to stick to them and make it a routine.
Step 2 – Set a Goal for the Day / Week / Year / Stage
“Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.” — Henry Ford
We all know about Ed Sheeran and the success of his music career in the last decade. Hit songs like Shape of You and Thinking Out Loud? Probably heard them at every live band at a bar.
But what most people don’t know are the struggles he faced in his early days. He left home at 19 and busked around the streets of London, sleeping on friends’ sofas. After a long period of busking and drinking, he decided on a whim to move to Los Angeles for a change in life. When he finally signed his first record deal with Alantic, he requested from his manager for James Blunt’s diary during the year he released the song You’re Beautiful and his debut album, and told his team: “We’re doing all of that (in his diary)— times two.”
The tenacity and determination of Sheeran led to the first album, +, success. What pave the road forward were the goals he set for him and his team. If he had stayed in London and continued his life with the ‘busking-and-drinking’ lifestyle, we probably would not have enjoyed the music he has produced today.
We don’t always have a James Blunt diary we can reference to in order to set our goals ahead, but we can use the SMART goal setting to do our planning and layout the major and minor goals we have for our work and personal matters. Set a grand goal to work on, the time line to achieve it, and the achievements to be made at every milestone.
Once our goals are set, it is easier to remind ourselves to work towards them and not fall into distraction traps. Goal setting makes it easier for us to visualize and focus on what we need to achieve.
Step 3 – Track Your Progress Frequently
“Failure is success in progress.” — Albert Einstein
Our success is not set in stone once we have goals. There are often times we stray off the path we set out, either because of new-found distractions or we get pulled into activities or tasks that were unplanned for.
By checking on your progress frequently, you have an idea how much have you completed, what is left outstanding, and what you can achieve next in your next interval. If it becomes a habit, you will no longer need to worry about deviating because your awareness of your goal progress will motivate you to steer away from potential time-wasters or to encourage to keep up to pace towards your goal. You can use task management tools like Todoist or Google Tasks to assist you in keeping track.
Even if you failed to steer your ship clear from distractions, you can always make amendments the next day. Satya Nadella once said at a Paris conference “You renew yourself every day. Sometimes you’re successful, sometimes you’re not, but it’s the average that counts”. Strive to make your day count and you will naturally work towards doing so.
References
An Inside Look at Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Daily Schedule
From Steve Jobs to Barack Obama: The morning routines of 8 of the world’s most successful people
The 5 Productive Morning Routines Of Highly Effective People
The Scam of the Morning Routine
The morning routines of the rich and famous
The business of being Ed Sheeran
Microsoft’s New CEO Nadella Says Secret To Success Is ‘Renew’ Or Die
