Tag: Focus

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Cultivate The Daily Habit of Asking for Help

Emulating what rich folks do isn’t always best for people who want to live a principled and moral life. However, you can learn how to give yourself an advantage by studying what rich people do differently from what poor people do. When morality and reality collide, it’s a sign that the habit is one that you need to incorporate into your daily life.

 

One super clear thing is that rich people are not afraid to ask for help. Of course, many rich people do not even realize how much support they get, but let’s think about this and then let’s find ways to cultivate the habit of asking for help in your life that is both moral and enriching.

 

Do Not Trade Hours for Dollars

 

While most people you hire will often provide an hourly rate, when you get paid for something, don’t charge by the hour. Instead, figure out what the value of the service is to the recipient and charge what the market will allow. A lot goes into being able to offer the service such as education, experience, connections, and so forth that differentiates you from the next person.

 

Perception, time, education, experience (and so forth) is the reason someone like Bill Gates can command a year’s average salary for a short speech, or a surgeon can charge six figures for an 8-hour procedure – it’s not just about the time. Never has been, but it’s something often taught to the average person to justify low wages.

 

Delegate To Willing Family Members

 

I don’t mean to be stereotypical so if I’m wrong, let me know in the comments, but this advice will probably resonate most with the women. Men are really good at delegating tasks to family members despite their net worth. Women are not as good at doing that, although the habit, according to research, is more prevalent in higher-income earners.

 

We can argue about it, but the best course of action is to think about and narrow it down to only considering what you can control and what you cannot control. You can only control your actions and reactions to things. You can’t control someone else at all. So, if you are feeling resentful in any way against your family because you feel like you are taking on too much work at home, speak up and start delegating just like other confident people do.

 

Outsource To Experts

 

When money is not a concern, the things you spend your money on are different than when you are struggling. Those who are struggling tend to spend more on housing, healthcare, and food, while those in higher tax brackets spend more on experiences and downtime than the necessities of life. However, even so, they are more productive, and this is because they aren’t afraid to outsource to experts to let them do what they do, giving them more free time to have amazing mind-opening experiences. Of course, having time to experience more fun and joy increases their perception of happiness. Set income benchmarks that signal time to outsource all the things you don’t need to be doing to meet those goals and beyond.

 

If you don’t like doing something, stop doing it. Don’t be ashamed of not wanting to clean your own toilet. There is someone out there who values their toilet cleaning skill and who wants nothing more than to be paid good money to clean your bathroom. The same can be said about literally anything in life. If you like doing it, keep doing it. If you don’t like doing it, stop doing it and find someone willing to trade something with you to do it, either money or something else of value.

 

How to Outsource to Save You More Time

 

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Eat One Meal a Week with Your Extended Family or Close Friends

One thing that is very important for your long-term happiness, even if you’re the biggest introvert alive, is the strength of your relationships within your family and your connection to the world at large. Study after study shows that maintaining a connection to others regularly is essential for health and happiness and is directly correlated with longevity.

Positive Attitude

A favored way to stay connected to someone is through sharing a meal. Everyone has to eat, and eating is an emotional experience for human beings. When you share an emotional experience with other humans, it connects you. This is probably why we’ve invented so many food-related holidays and even associate funerals with food.

 

Along with other positive ways to connect like phone calls, emails, and text messages – enjoying a regular meal with those who are important in your life, or those you desire to be important in your life, will make a huge difference in how connected you feel to them and how connected they feel to you.

 

If one of your long-term life goals is to have strong, loving, and powerful relationships, you know that focusing on the long term is the most effective way to impact this part of your life as it’s what you do over time that impacts today, and what you do today that impacts tomorrow. How your relationships feel about you will be about combining the last memorable connections weighted toward the last time you were together.

 

Since you understand this and want to start now forming daily habits that change your life and set you up for success, start setting aside one day a week, at a minimum, for enjoying a meal with someone in your extended family or to share a meal with someone outside of your family.

 

One week it might be that you enjoy lunch with Aunt Alice, and the next week it might be drinks and wings with a business connection – it’s okay to mix it up as long as you make it a habit to clear your schedule to enjoy a meal with someone outside your immediate family on a weekly basis.

 

This one addition to your calendar and act will keep you connected to the world at large and expose you to new ideas and thoughts, as well as solidify a deeper connection to those you choose to meet again and again. Plus, it may even push you out of your comfort zone and allow you space to discover new things and interests.

Write Down 3 Things You’re Grateful for Each Day

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Schedule Your Daily Activities Based on Your Goals

Developing daily habits that drive success sounds complicated, but the truth is, when you break down your actions based on what you want to achieve and then distribute that action realistically into your daily to-do list, success will start to feel almost automatic.

 

Turn Daily Planning into a Habit

 

Every morning first thing, it’s important to take a look at the to-do list that has been created based on the goals you’ve set at other times. Putting the actions, you need to do in order of importance and based on today’s reality is important to help avoid any roadblocks to achieving the goals you’ve set.

 

This type of planning should only take about five minutes and consist of simply opening your scheduling method, whether it’s paper or digital, and double-checking the schedule for any bottlenecks or issues. You can then rearrange things on the fly to ensure ease of success.

 

All To-Do Lists Need to Be Goal-Based

 

If something made it to your to-do list, it needs to be based on the goals you’ve set for yourself. For instance, if you have the goal of losing 50 pounds by a certain date today in your calendar, you might include your daily calorie limit, your daily moving goals, and your hydration goals.

 

If it’s related to a deliverable for work such as getting 10,000 edited words to your book editor by a certain date, then you know simply by looking at the schedule because you’ve set aside the time to devote to the future goal. It’s all on the to-do list.

 

Break It All Down into Small Micro Tasks

 

When you have the deliverable or result that you want described in great detail as part of your SMART goal-setting process, and it is easier to break down each goal into smaller micro-tasks resulting in your to-do list for today.

 

Consider Your Week, Months, and Years as a Whole

 

When you do your daily planning, you’ll also want to schedule weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly planning to help you get a big picture look at all the balls you have in the air. These longer times for planning should be scheduled to ensure that you don’t have bottlenecks and are taking control of the things you have control over.

 

Schedule Everything

 

Remember, you want to automatically schedule the work and actions you need to develop your goals and objectives. But don’t just focus on one aspect of your life.

 

Instead, you want to schedule everything in regarding everything to do with your life, whether it’s time with friends, which will be part of your long-term goals of building strong relationships, or 45 minutes of fast walking because that’s part of your long-term goal to stay healthy – taking the time to schedule every action you will take will assist in building daily habits that lead to success.

 

Have No More Than 3 Daily Priorities

 

While you will schedule everything, even if it’s a nap break, you want to only put up to three things as your daily priority. Setting daily priorities should only happen the week that you’re looking at the schedule and perfecting it. The main reason is you cannot know what a priority will be for next Monday if you don’t know that your spouse will be sick.

 

Try Different Productivity Methods

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Part of creating a schedule and making it work is learning how to be more productive and get things done. Everyone has a sworn-by method. The best thing is to experiment with other methods. Try a new one each 30 days until something sticks with you.

 

Some methods to try include the Pomodoro Technique, Block Scheduling, and the Eisenhower Matrix.

 

Use The Right Planning Tools

 

It doesn’t matter if your chosen planning tools are paper or digital as long as you use the tool and work for you. Try different tools. Some people swear by Google Calendar, and others hate it.

 

Finally, eliminate distractions so that you stick to the schedule you have ended up with each day. Technically if your daily activities are organized first based on your long-term and short-term goals, then each day, the actions you take will be impactful, trackable, and 100 percent within your own control to do or not do.

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Daily Habits to Encourage Positive Thinking and Outlook

When you start making the good things you do into habits, suddenly everything you want to change seems easy. Want to lose weight? Just eat 100 fewer calories a day, move an hour a day, and while the change won’t be noticeable or hard to stick to, the results over a long time, such as a year, will be dramatic.

 

  • Start Your Day with Uplifting Music – Even if you think you like listening to negative music to get your anger out, the truth is that it does affect your mind and inform your thoughts. There is a time and place for everything, so first thing in the morning, feed your mind with positive music. It can help to pick one pick me up song that works no matter what to listen to.

 

  • Reframe Roadblocks as Challenges – How you think of things and word things makes a difference in how you react. If you can use positive language to reframe the things that get in your way or threaten to get in your way, you’ll naturally teach yourself how to overcome them.

 

  • Use Positive Words to Frame Your Life – When you are talking about your life, even if something is less than perfect, use positive language to talk about it or think about it. When you do that, it will make you feel more satisfied and happier with your life.

 

  • Ignore Other People’s Drama – Whether it’s work-related, HOA-related, or family-related if the drama isn’t something you have any control over, you want to ignore it. You only have control over one person, yourself, not anyone else. The more you realize and accept that, the less bothered you’ll be about the drama going on in the world.

 

  • Fill Your Mind with Hopeful Thoughts – It’s natural to sometimes go toward the negative, but you can change that by purposefully filling your mind with hopeful thoughts about the world and your own personal life.

 

  • Keep a Gratitude Journal – Each evening, write down three things you are grateful for that happened today. This is going to help you focus on the positive even as you sleep tonight.

Daily Habits to Encourage Positive Thinking and Outlook

  • Tell One Person or Organization Thank You Each Day – It’s one thing to write about your thankfulness in your private journal, but how about letting someone in your life know that they are important to you. People like getting told that they did something good. They’ll remember you.

 

  • Surround Yourself with Other Positive People – While shunning others doesn’t come off as all that positive, the more you surround yourself with those who are also positive, the more you’ll feel positive. It’s really just another version of the whole “birds of a feather” idea, and while it’s a stereotype, it’s mostly true.

 

  • Focus On Mindfulness – One thing that breeds discontent more than almost anything is expectations and living in another time, whether the past or the future. The more you can focus on what you are experiencing right now, the more satisfaction in life you’re going to feel.

 

Nothing here takes more than a few moments of your time each day, but if you tie the behavior to something you do each day, you can turn positive thinking into a habit grounded in reality and fuel your life in a positive direction.

 

 

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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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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 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!