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Daily Habits to Get Smarter: Read Daily For At Least 15 Minutes

One stat about reading you should know is that people who read at least 15 minutes a day are happier, more successful, and of course, they know more. Finding an hour to read might be hard for busy folks, but everyone can find 15 minutes to read. In order to build this habit of reading each day, simply follow these tips.

Invest in More Training and Education

  • Choose Long and Challenging Books – When you incorporate this reading practice, you don’t want to use your 15 minutes of reading articles on the internet. Instead, choose challenging and interesting books for this particular challenge, such as the philosophy greats or something college level you want to learn.

 

  • Make a List of Books to Read – After you’ve set the criteria for the books you want to read, make a list of them. Put them in order of your interest. It can help to figure out what’s coming up in your life so that you can read things that help you with your current reality, but you don’t have to.

 

  • Schedule The Reading Time – You’ve read at least once about the importance of scheduling in everything you want to do each day, and reading for 15 minutes is no different. If you schedule a time and make it into a ritual, it’ll become a habit faster than if you just go by the seat of your pants.

 

  • Create a Comfortable Reading Space – You’ll need a good place to sit so that you can comfortably read the book using good posture. You’ll also need good lighting so you can see the words on the page or tablet. A table to put a drink, a place to put up your feet, good lighting, and temperature-controlled will ensure that you don’t feel tortured while reading.

 

  • Keep Dictionaries Nearby – You don’t want to interrupt your reading to find the dictionary or other manuscripts that can help you understand, so keep these in your reading area.

 

  • Keep a Reading Log or Journal – After you’ve finished your 15 minutes of reading, it can also help you log what you read and your thoughts about it. You can just log the time, or you can log your thoughts too. It’s up to you.

 

  • Get In Extra – Keep a book in your purse or car that you can pull out and read whenever you want to. It doesn’t need to be the same book you’re reading during your 15 minutes of daily reading, but a book you want to read that is easy to leave for a time and come back to, using wait time in a good way.

 

Choose a list of books to read during your daily 15 minutes that are long, well written, books that are philosophical like The Bible, The Sound and The Fury, by William Faulkner, or Beyond Good and Evil, by Nietzsche. It’s up to you but make them challenging books that need more study beyond the main text for understanding. Not only will you experience more success in life, but you’ll feel happier about it too.

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Daily Health Habits: Mind Your Posture

Sometimes it’s truly mind-blowing how something that seems on the surface not to matter at all is really life-changing. If you want to be healthy long-term, paying close attention to the actions you take every day will make a difference, like drinking plenty of water, exercising, eating right, and so forth are all important, but if you don’t mind your posture, you could end up suffering more than you think.

 

Proper posture can help reduce lower back pain, headaches, neck, and shoulder tension, wear and tear on your joints, increased lung capacity, better circulation, better digestion, and more energy, all benefits of checking and correcting your posture.

 

Get Expert Advice

 

If you have any type of body pain, it’s important to find out from a physical therapist or a personal trainer the best way to hold your posture living the life you live. You can also find professionals talking about posture and proper posture on YouTube. Just make sure you follow someone who really knows what they’re doing and saying.

 

Buy a Good Bed

 

Don’t skimp on buying the right bed for your needs. Spending money investing in a good bed with a long warranty designed for your type of sleeping and your personal needs will be one of the main things that help you sleep well and live a mostly pain-free life.

 

Invest In the Right Furniture

 

Like your bed is important for your posture, so is the furniture you buy and use for pleasure and work. Each person has different needs, as someone with lower back pain will need a firm surface and perhaps specialized seating. In contrast, someone without issues now will simply need to buy high-quality ergonomic and comfortable items.

 

Invest In Your Workspace

 

Like you invest in the comfort of your home, don’t forget any areas you work in. It’s not good for you to work in your bed with poor posture. Instead, set up your workspace so that it’s good for long-term use and avoids pressure or repetitive injury.

 

Make a list showing items that you need to purchase or replace to ensure that you have a comfortable home and work environment that isn’t just attractive but also good for your posture. You won’t regret it. Then each day, when you first get up, do a few posture-affirming stretches so that you can become more mindful of your posture the rest of the day.

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Developing The Habit of Doing

Whenever you set up your schedule, there may be things you put on your schedule that you don’t want to do, or try to avoid doing, which can lead to procrastination and other problems. If you want to stop allowing this to happen, there are some strategies you can put in place that help you develop the habit of doing.

 

Schedule Everything

 

How you arrange your calendar makes all the difference. Most people only put work and appointments in their calendars. Put everything you want to do in your calendar, from lunch with your spouse to ladies’ night out with friends to a picnic with your daughter. If you’re going to get it done, it has to be in the schedule, or it won’t happen.

 

Schedule Properly

 

When you do create your schedule, it’s not going to help to list the things you want to do without knowing how long you’ll take, where you’ll do it, how you’ll do it, and more. This requires research. Scheduling properly includes considering the real amount of time you will take and where and how you’ll do it.

 

Understand That Perfection Does Not Exist

 

Sometimes putting something off is done to save face. You think that you’re not good at doing it, so you put it off. The thing is, no one is perfect. As long as you do things according to directions, the best you can do is better than not done but done never means perfect.

 

Results Matter More Than Intention

 

You mean to do the thing. Truly really mean to. Then fail anyway. But if you didn’t do it when you said you would, whether you told yourself or someone else, you’re going to feel guilty. Why put yourself in a position of guilt to start with? If something is that bad, and you can do it, outsource it. Until then, just do it.

 

Do It for Two Minutes

 

Sometimes all you really need is to get started. If you’ve done a good job with your schedule, it’s not going to be that hard for you to use rote memorization to get going and get started. You don’t even need to assign a feeling to it. Just start doing it for two minutes, and if you still don’t want to do it after that, you can stop.

 

Plan For Breaks

Scheduling to Avoid Burnout: Learn to Take More Breaks

When you are doing anything that you dislike doing, don’t torture yourself. Yes, get it done as soon as possible according to your needs but don’t make yourself do the thing you hate for 8 hours when it’s not necessary. Plan for breaks and try to give yourself incentives along the way.

 

The fact is, whenever you need to get something done, simply doing it will take less time and cause less stress than all the gymnastics most people do when they try to avoid something. If you just get it done, you’ll be able to move on. Make this a habit by creating better schedules and then just getting it done. After all, if it’s running through your mind, it’s taking up space that can be used in a much more creative way if you just finish it.

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Learning to Say Yes or No: Always Ask If What You Are Doing Is Really Worth It or Not

One bit of advice that most life coaches will give you regarding living a more balanced life is that you need to say no more often. But sometimes, they aren’t that clear on how you decide if something is a no or a yes. One way to do better than saying no is to learn how to say yes, the right way. Once you learn how to say yes, the right way, it’ll become a habit, and saying no will never be difficult again.

Why Your To-Do Lists Are Failing You

  • Tell Them You’ll Answer by a Certain Time – When anyone asks you to do something unless it’s an enthusiastic “hell yeah,” don’t say yes or no immediately. Tell the person you’ll get back to them by a certain deadline to give them an answer. This gives you time to ensure you really want to do it or not.

 

  • Check Your Schedule – Think about what it will take to do what you are being asked to do. Will you even have enough time? Even if you want to do it and don’t have the time, it might be best to say no.

 

  • Will It Be Worth It? – When you think of the results of doing what is being asked of you, what will be the positive results from it? Is it worth everything else that has to be done to lead up to that moment?

 

  • Does It Fit in With Your Overall Mission in Life or Work? – Sometimes, people ask things of us that no longer fit our life mission. If you know your own principles, morals, values, and what you’re striving to achieve, it will be a lot easier for you to figure out if the ask fits in with your life mission or work before you say yes.

 

  • Will You Have to Give Up Something to Do It? – There is always an opportunity cost for everything you do or don’t do. Try to figure out what it will cost you if you do it versus the cost if you don’t do it.

 

  • What Are the Negatives to Saying No? – Make a list of what will happen when you say no. Then, beside each action that may happen, record what response you will offer? Sometimes asking about what the “worst” thing that can happen given this decision can help.

 

  • What Are the Negatives to saying Yes? – Just like you may miss something when you say no, you may also miss something else when you say yes. Consider the effects of saying yes and how that might look, and what problems might result.

 

When you take the time to hash out each ask, you’ll end up saying yes or no with purpose.

Saying no just to say no isn’t going to be helpful to you in your life but saying yes with purpose – which sometimes will lead to a no instead of a yes – no matter how much you think you want to say yes – can really pay off.

Being purposeful with your answers, even when it’s yes, will make you feel more motivated to do things when you say yes.

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Spend Two Minutes Each Day Unconnected and With Only Yourself and Your Thoughts

Even if you work hard at disconnecting from your notifications and only checking the news twice a day, it’s still important to intentionally disconnect with the world and focus on yourself and your own thoughts each day.

 

How do you really feel about the project you just completed?

 

How do you really feel about what’s going on with your daughter?

 

The way you feel about something may not be clear when clouded by other people’s thoughts and emotions or distractions from the world.

 

Your thoughts build your reality, and your mind – both conscious and subconscious – is what creates your thoughts. You are in charge of what you allow into your mind based on what you read, consume, and whom you surround yourself with, and the sources you choose in which to educate yourself. It’s all up to you.

 

Most thoughts are subconscious and not something you are aware of at all times. This is mostly because you cannot actually think of more than one thing at a time, so thoughts will pop in and out of your mind depending on what you are doing but mostly just go on without your realizing it.

 

For this reason, you must create the habit of tuning out of the world and into your mind at least once a day. You only have to do this for about two minutes a day. It helps if you choose one thing to focus on at a time.

 

To accomplish this, it’ll be best to tie this mindfulness with something else that you need to do, like make the bed. Making the bed will only take you a couple of minutes, and you can combine it with mindful thought. For example, after you’ve made the bed, you can sit on top of it and meditate and think for two minutes before going on with your day as part of your morning ritual.

 

But, since it’s only two minutes, you can literally do this any time you can be alone during the day or night. Turn off any notifications and eliminate any way that you’re likely to be interrupted. Finally, allow your mind to wander and think about all the things you ignore the rest of the time.

 

The good news is that more self-aware people are generally also more empathetic. They know how to notice their own emotional or knowledge blind spots, aren’t afraid to ask for and receive constructive feedback, and are very curious to delve into their own minds and get to know how they are more just as much as they are interested in knowing those who are around them by demonstrating that through their heightened ability to listen more than they talk.

Disconnect Yourself from Distractions and Notifications

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Daily Organizational Habit: Make Your Bed Each Morning

Developing daily habits that take care of your environment keeping it uncluttered is useful for multiple reasons. One, because your home and office will generally be cleaner if you’re committed to daily organization, but secondly because the action creates a transition for your day that can trigger more good behavior all day long, thus increasing your happiness and satisfaction level.

 

  • The Action Creates Transition in Your Mind – When you take the time to clean your room in the morning and make your bed, the action will serve to give you a little more of a wake-up than just leaving the bed messy.

 

  • You’ll Feel Accomplished – The ten minutes it takes to make your bed well will also make you feel more accomplished, and when you start your day feeling like you’re succeeding, it sets you up for even more success.

 

  • Productivity Will Increase for The Day – When you do something productive right away, the feel-good hormones will take over a bit, thus helping motivate you to do even more useful stuff the rest of the day.

 

  • Less Clutter and Mess Means Less Stress – Science has already proven that no one thrives in a cluttered environment. While we can debate what constitutes clutter and disorganization, if it feels organized to you and less messy, it’ll serve the same effect of making you feel less stressed.

 

  • Everything Will Become Cleaner – When you start cleaning things for five or ten minutes at a time, like with bed making, it’s just natural that you’re going to clean other things around the bed. You’re going to put your night clothing away, put anything dirty in the hamper, and probably even notice the dust building on your headboard sooner than if you did not make your bed daily.

 

  • Bedmaking Gives a Reason to Perform Useful Body Movements – Many people are worried about exercising, but some of your workouts can be completed by doing housework. It’s good for your body to stretch to make your bed and bend and pull to get the sheets on. It’s a great two-minute morning workout to wake you up and get the blood pumping that serves dual purposes.

 

  • The Habit Starts a Pattern of More Good Habits – Human nature is such that when you make good choices, more good choices seem to come easy, but when you make one choice, your brain deems ‘bad’ it’s harder to get back on the horse. Start your day positively, and you set yourself up for more positivity.

 

  • Your Home Should Be Your Retreat – So often, especially if you have to work a full-time job under someone else’s hours and rules, we forget that our home is supposed to be our safe place to fall and let it get disorganized and even dirty. But if you want to feel better about yourself and your life, no matter what type of home you live in now, organize it and keep it clean, and you’re going to feel better about everything.

 

To make it more fun to make your bed each morning, make your bedroom a retreat from the world. Invest in the best bedding and mattress you can afford to buy and make it beautiful and comfortable according to your desires and needs. You shouldn’t need to go to a hotel to have an amazing sleeping experience, and making your bed is just part of that effort that will improve your life in amazing ways.

Organization Is A Daily Requirement

 

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Daily Educational Habits: Discover Something New You Did Not Know About Each Month

Learning something new as often as possible is usually the advice the biggest thought leaders, gurus, and grandmas tend to pass down to generations after them when asked what changed their life and made their success possible.

 

This advice to keep learning your entire life can be misconstrued as a call for higher education, but in reality, it’s a call to be open-minded enough to always keep learning the new things about the world and yourself and not to close your mind or doors in the process.

 

Because learning new things keeps you young of mind if not of body, and that’s the best way to arm yourself. Education is required to navigate the world of the future. Because whether you like it or not, the future will come. Keep on learning.

 

  • Improved Self-Confidence – When you keep your mind informed about the world and the new things being discovered depending on your interests, even if you didn’t discover it, your confidence in yourself to understand and know things makes you not only appear self-confident to others but makes you feel confident inside.

 

  • Keep Your Mind Sharp and Your Brain Healthy – Neuroscientists know that when it comes to the brain, it’s a case of losing it if you don’t use it. The more you can use your brain and challenge it to make new synopsis, the healthier your brain will be even if you’re older.

 

  • Learn Useful Life Skills – When you want to know how to do something, it’s easy to learn these days. Whether it’s fixing your own sink or learning coding, you can do it from the comfort of your home using sites like skillshare.com or YouTube.com.

 

  • Boost Your Mental and Emotional Health – When you can do more things for yourself, it feels good, and due to it, you’ll be a lot more emotionally healthy. For example, instead of wringing your hands about something, you can learn all about it and learn how to help.

 

  • Stay Connected to Society – The more you learn about different topics, the more people you will begin to relate to. Being able to relate to more people helps prevent you from feeling isolated and alone. For example, immersing yourself in the Japanese culture will teach you that we’re more alike than we are different.

 

  • Experience a More Successful Career – When you have a basic understanding of how life works, it’s easier to be more successful because you’ll know in advance the basic steps to take to get what you want. For example, if you want to learn more about SMART goal setting, you can devote the time to it, improving everything you do from that day forward due to your superior goal-setting skills.

 

  • Become Happier and More Satisfied with Life – When you have a more open-minded view of the world and a more realistic view of the world, you end up happier and more satisfied because you know the truth that over time the world becomes a better place for everyone – and it doesn’t matter what the sensationalistic media says because you’ve studied the history, know the stats and are focused on truth.

 

  • Have a Longer Life – When you know more about topics you need to know, such as nutrition, money management, and so forth, you’re likely to live a much longer life because you’re more likely to implement it when you know something for sure.

 

Lifelong learning doesn’t mean you have to go to an accredited university to learn. You can learn in more informal ways and still be considered a lifelong learner. As long as you’re committed to learning something new that you wanted to know or need to know each month of your life, you’re always going to stay aware and current, making you feel more successful and satisfied with your life.

Start Investing in Experiences

 

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Daily Habit to Improve Your Health: Drink Enough Water Every Day

While the average American consumes about 22 percent of their calories in the beverages they drink, over 75 percent of Americans also walk around chronically dehydrated. Problems like fatigue, foggy memory, irritability, and more like slow metabolism are associated with chronic dehydration that you can fix simply by incorporating the daily habit of drinking enough water.

stay hydrated

  • Stop Drinking Other Beverages –To start drinking more water, you’ll want to stop drinking any other beverage but water for the time being. You’ll also want to measure out the amount of water you want to drink each day so that you can see it visually and space out your consumption throughout the entire day.

 

  • Know-How Much Water You Need – Everyone is slightly different regarding their hydration needs. If you eat a low carbohydrate diet versus a high carbohydrate diet, you may need more water or less water, depending on your diet. Start with the recommended daily amount for average-weight men at 125 ounces and 90 ounces for average-weight women, and work your way up or down depending on how you feel.

 

  • Set Your Goals – Once you know how much you’re going to drink each day, set the goal and be very specific about how you’re going to do it. A lot of people find success is to start the morning with 8 to 32 ounces of water before consuming anything else. Try adding a squeeze of lemon to make it special.

 

  • Keep Water with You at All Times – Don’t underestimate how lazy you’re going to be about this. Invest in an eco-friendly, refillable water bottle. Keep the bottle with you full and ready to drink at all times, whether you’re in your office, in the car, or on the sofa.

 

  • Take Advantage of Triggers – If you normally drink another beverage when reading a book, checking your email, or enjoying a movie, make your water just as special. Buy good-tasting water and beautiful glasses and experiment with fruit-infused ice to make it feel special.

 

  • Drink One Glass Before Eating – For each meal and snack you’re going to have during the day, give yourself enough time to enjoy one glass of water thirty minutes before the meal or snack. Drink less during your meals and more between your meal to improve digestion. This will create a ritual with the water, which is easier for you to remember and habituate.

 

When you drink enough water every day, you’re going to notice that your skin texture improves, your eyes become clearer, and your brain fog disappears. Not only that, some people have even suggested they experience less body pain. It’s a wonder more people aren’t working towards this daily goal since it helps with so many issues.

5 Rituals to Boost Your Energy and Productivity

 

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Daily Mood-Boosting Habit: Watch the News and All Media Less

Due to cable news and political personality shows both on cable and off cable, it’s possible to be hyper-aware of what’s happening all over the planet at any given moment, and what’s worse, you can get notified about it as it happens.

 

The problem with this isn’t that you’re informed but that the information is repeated so often that it starts feeling overwhelming. We either start tuning it out, or we start feeling anxious about all the horrible stuff going on.

news

The truth is, you really only need to watch the actual news twice a day, once in the morning to inform you about what happened while you slept and once in the evening to inform you of what happened while you worked. That’s it. As far as the rest of the media goes, spending less time in front of screens improves all aspects of your life.

 

  • Sitting is Bad for Your Health – Watching TV or screens all the time contributes to obesity, and not just from sitting, but the constant bombardment of information you receive causes you to eat more unhealthy food and drink less water. That, combined with not moving, is a recipe for disaster.

 

  • Television and Screens Distract from Real Life – You have real people in your life that want and need to do real stuff. Watching everyone else do fun stuff is no way to live. Sure, movies are great for bad weather days, sick days, and broke days – but spending your life watching this media should not be your way of life. Ending the habit now and doing more real-life and less observing fake people living life will make all the difference to your success.

 

  • TV is Expensive – Some people are spending 100’s of dollars every month on cable TV and other streaming options just to watch other people do pretend things or even watch reality TV. There is a place for this in society, of course, not everyone can travel so it’s cathartic to watch Travel TV sometimes, but it can be very expensive to pay for all that TV and the equipment to watch it.

 

  • Screens Ruin Intimacy – Numerous studies show that having a TV or screens in the bedroom can ruin your sex life, with couples who have a TV in their room reporting having sex less than half the time of their non-television and screen in the bedroom counterparts.

Finally, watching too much television and talking heads can affect your worldview in a bad way. Remember, the media, as are most movies and TV shows, whether streaming or not, are sensationalized to attract attention and get more views. You may start seeing the world in a way that isn’t realistic or even close to reality simply by feeding your mind with too much of this type of shocking information designed to persuade you and not merely inform you.

 

Write Down 3 Things You’re Grateful for Each Day

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Daily Organizational Habit: Prepare Your Clothing in Advance

One of the things you can incorporate into your daily life to ensure more happiness and success is to be more organized. When you’re more organized, life just goes much more smoothly. While some people seem to be born organized, those who aren’t can simply start developing the habit of organization by getting prepared for everything they do in advance.

 

Developing the habit of preparing your clothing in advance for everything you do will help cut down on anxiety and encourage better daily cleaning and organizational habits regarding your clothing and bedroom. Plus, you’re going to look and feel better each day at the office, even if your office is at home.

 

Planning all your clothing choices in advance will do more for you than you may think, in addition to looking more fashionable due to choosing clothing based on what you’re going to do, the weather, and other factors instead of being in a rush – you’re going to get these benefits too.

 

  • You’ll Feel Less Stressed Out – When you’re not rushing around trying to match things, you’re so much less likely to suffer from anxiety about getting dressed. If you have thought it out and picked something that makes you feel good, you’re going to have a better day.

 

  • You Will No Longer Have Outfit Regrets – You know as well as I do that if you don’t plan your clothing choices, things go wrong. You don’t have the right undergarments for that thing, so you can’t wear it, or sadly, you did and saw the pictures later and regretted it. When you plan in advance, you know the outfit looks great and makes you feel great, or you don’t even want to own it anymore.

 

  • You’ll Save Time – When you are scheduling time to plan the outfits you are going to wear, you will actually spend less time doing it. The main reason is that you’ll cut down on the tornado effect of rushing around tossing things on the floor or bed that you choose not to wear and then having to clean that up at some point.

 

  • You’ll Get More Wear from What You Own – When you aren’t planning your outfits, you end up wasting. But something amazing happens when you start planning – you start wearing more of what you own and buying things you will wear. It’s a win-win side effect all the way around.

 

  • You’ll Appear More Professional – When you have planned an outfit, you’ll also take the time to get the cat fur off your coat, shine up your boots, and pick things that look good on your body for the purposes you need them.

 

  • You’ll Feel Better About Yourself – If you look like an unkempt person all the time, even if you say you don’t care what you look like, you’ll feel bad about yourself. You don’t have to wear makeup or business suits but planning a look and getting cleaned up each day feels good.

 

The best way to accomplish this is first to get your wardrobe to make sense to you. Most people like to change out their closets seasonally, and some people have good luck organizing their closets by style and color or season and color or type and color. How you organize it will depend on your own needs, space, and lifestyle.

 

Then, to prepare an outfit, check your calendar for tomorrow to find out what you’re going to do that day and check the weather conditions you’ll need to be prepared for to maintain your comfort and safety. Note what type of self-care you need to be comfortable in the outfit, including hair styles, accessories, footwear, and so forth, so that you aren’t caught off guard as you get ready in the morning.

 

Organize your Environment for Success!