Tag: setting goals

Posted on

Invest a Percentage of Your Income for Your Future

As you work on your daily habits that help safeguard your future, one of the daily habits that will pay off the most is learning to save and invest a percentage of your income for your future by habit. It’s hard to save money for the future if you’re not able to really think about the future much, but there is no willpower needed if you just think about what you’re doing today, and keep doing it as a matter of course, you’ll end up benefiting exponentially.

 

  • Determine Your Priorities – When you know what your priorities are today and into the future, through your life, it’s going to be much easier seeing your daily spending and savings goals.

Better Goal Setting Tips for Maximum Productivity

  • Automate Investing and Saving – Once you have set up your goals, you can automate most of the process by having a percentage of your paycheck go directly to savings and investment accounts. If it’s never there to spend, you will be more likely to save it.

 

  • Avoid Consumer Debt – When you are setting up your daily habits, you know that avoiding consumer debt is an imperative for anyone who really wants to have a safe and stable future. Therefore, you don’t buy things without a daily plan for saving and spending.

 

  • Borrow Money Like Rich People Do – When and if you borrow money, only borrow it when you really don’t need it, and the interest rate is super low. If the rate is lower than what you can earn on your money, borrowing is smart. For example, if you qualify for a zero-interest car loan, why wouldn’t you?

 

  • Plan For Big Expenses – When you habituate your spending and saving, you will always plan for big expenses (and really all expenses) so that you’re never caught off guard. You will know that at this particular time in the future, you’re going to buy a thing, and you know how much you need to be saving daily to ensure it happens.

 

  • Plan for Emergencies – Even though it seems impossible, you can plan for potential emergencies, making them less tragic. In everyone’s life, they have things happen. People get sick. People get hurt. People lose their jobs. People even die. Plan for at least one emergency by saving six to eight months of living expenses in a liquid account.

 

  • Save All Windfalls – During a lifetime, you’re going to get monetary windfalls once in a blue moon for birthdays, inheritances, or bonuses and raises at work arrange for every single one to be saved or invested without even giving it a thought.

 

  • Take a Cooking Class – Most people waste money by eating out at restaurants and not even good ones. Decide to learn how to cook so that you can make good quality food at home.

 

  • Buy Experiences Not Stuff – When you do plan expenses, consider having more experiences and less stuff. When you spend money on an adventure, you always learn something that gives you value far beyond what you buy.

 

  • Track Your Efforts – Whatever you track and pay attention to is what will grow. Track your savings efforts by checking up on your accounts at least quarterly. This is important when you’re doing automatic deposits just to make sure it’s all working as planned.

 

When you start thinking of the daily habits you have as good things that automatically take care of your future, each day becomes a no-brainer. You just save money just because that’s what you do and not something difficult to do.

 

It’s part of your priorities and a driving force for your lifestyle, and that’s what you set up to be important. Do you see a method to the madness now? Set your goals, schedule the actions you need to take to reach your goals, and then simply live your life doing a little bit each day, and one day you’ll arrive in the future automatically, and all will be well.

 

Posted on

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

 

Posted on

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

Posted on

Daily Mindset Habit: Own Your Own Happiness

Growing up watching stories about heroes saving others, or people finding their “other half,” or worse, watching your own family member waste away after the love of their life dies as if the life they have of their own is without value.

 

The truth is, love is great, and you should experience all the love you want to, in all its forms, but how other people feel about you should not define your happiness. You define your happiness, and it’s what you do or don’t do and ultimately how you feel about yourself that makes you happy or not happy.

 

Once you start practicing the daily mindset of owning your own happiness, the world will open up to you in ways that you may not have considered. To accomplish owning your own happiness, practice each of these attitudes each day.

 

Accept Yourself

 

Getting to know you also means that at some point, you have to accept who you are, flaws and all. That doesn’t mean you use the flaws as an excuse. No – instead, you discover ways to overcome the flaws. If you’re short, you get a stair step to help, and you don’t give up.

 

No one is suggesting that you accept anything that is changeable about yourself. Whether through exercise or surgery, if you can change something and determine it’s important to change it, do so. Do it because you think it’s important. Otherwise, accept who you are as you are now.

 

Fix Yourself

 

As mentioned above, while you are self-accepting about things that you can’t change, after all, you’re born who you are born to be, and you cannot change much, but what you can change and do have control over is very powerful. When you identify things you don’t like that you can fix, decide right away to start fixing it by adding daily habits that help into your schedule.

 

For example, if you’re self-aware enough to realize that you tend to pack on extra weight around the middle, which is a health issue, and your long-term plans include living until you’re 90 despite your genetic predisposition to heart issues adding in daily heart-healthy activities, and eating a low-fat vegan diet will pay off big time over the years even though it feels like a very small change today.

 

Express Yourself

 

One thing that shows that a person has manifested into a complete adult human being is expressing who you are without shame and concern about other people’s feelings. This does not mean you lack empathy either, and it simply means that you don’t ask permission to be who you are, and you’re not afraid to set boundaries surrounding how people behave around you.

 

The way this may look in your schedule today is a 30-minute anti-anxiety meditation session an hour before you meet up with your mother-in-law. You want a good relationship with her. You know it’s contentious, so you do all you can to calm yourself before the meeting, and then you’re in the best possible position to have a good day.

 

Finally, the more you value yourself, the happier you’re going to allow yourself to become. People who value their time and themselves aren’t afraid to say no to what they have no joy in doing. They are not people-pleasers, they’re self-pleasers, but they have a high level of morality too in that they’re empathetic to others, but they’re not going to be used or walked on.

 

Posted on

Daily Mindset Habit: Value Your Time Over Everything Else

If you’ve ever been told that you have the same 24 hours as the next person, pay close attention to this post and take this daily mindset habit idea to heart. A mindset of the rich that differs from their non-rich counterparts is that the rich tend to place a high value on their time.

 

Time Not Money is Finite

 

We love acting like money, and certain natural resources are so limited, but the truth is, it’s time and not money that is finite. And due to money, you can actually buy other people’s time, thus placing a higher value on your time than theirs.

 

For example, if you know that your time is worth $100 an hour because that’s how much your boss pays you or how much you bill your clients, why would you wait in a 30-minute line to return a $10 item? Likewise, why would you spend an hour grocery shopping when you can pay someone enabling you to earn more money?

 

Calculate The Worth of Your Time

 

Part of the problem is that most people have never calculated the worth of their time. They know how much their boss pays them, or they know how much they want to bill their clients, but often these numbers are completely arbitrary and are simply the “going rate” that is not based on reality either. In fact, if more people established the worth of their time based on reality, they’d demand a lot more money from their employers.

 

Most HR departments use the number of 2080 yearly hours to designate full-time work. So even if you’re on a salary, they’re going to say that you earn your paycheck by working full time, which is equal to 40 hours a week for 52 weeks a year, for a total of 2080 hours.

 

This HR department magic number ends up on the companies compensation records as part of the benefits of the job and health insurance, paid time off (PTO), and other compensation. This is a great place for you to start figuring how much your time is worth but doesn’t consider the entire picture. After all, if you’re on salary, you don’t work only 40 hours a week.

 

So, to calculate your hourly worth, let’s focus on what you would like your life to be like, not what it currently is. If you want a specific lifestyle, go ahead, and add up what that would really cost. Then add in how much you want to work, not how much you do work, and that is your hourly worth even if you’re not there yet.

 

For example, if you want to earn 120K a year before taxes by working 20 hours a week, that equates to only 1040 hours of work a year, making your hourly worth over $115 an hour. Knowing this, since you don’t love mowing your lawn, you should jump at the chance of paying Billy down the street $50 bucks a week to keep your lawn nice because it’s worth it to you based on how much your time is really worth according to your life design.

 

Some Things Are Priceless

 

One thing the rich have figured out that hasn’t been passed down to the masses is that some things are priceless. Your child’s birth, their first birthday, kindergarten graduation, and anything that takes you away from those types of things – the things that will never happen again – should come at a much higher price and even be considered priceless. When you start to think of your own time as priceless and irreplaceable, productivity becomes almost automatic because you know there is no time to waste.

 

When you truly understand not only the value of your time, but the probability of the length of your life, and how you cannot go back in time, or forward, and that you only have right now – when you really get that – it becomes so much easier to habitually value your time above all else – because your time is the most precious thing you have. You cannot get it back once squandered.

 

How to Create Repeatable Workflows for Better Time Management

Posted on

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

Free and Low-Cost Automation Tools You Can Implement Today

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.

Posted on

Learn The SMART Goal Making Process

Proper goal setting is one of the most important skills you can learn in terms of how much goodness it’ll add to your life. By learning this goal-setting system, you’ll gain a sense of direction so that you can organize your resources in a way that helps you reach your goals.

 

When you craft a SMART goal, the way you phrase the goal helps you focus on what’s important so that you can make decisions about the actions you’re taking in a way that impacts your goal. Not only that, but the goal also provides the motivation you need to take the small daily actions toward success.

 

Example of a SMART Goal: “By Sunday night, I’m going to increase my total weekly word count from 7000 words to 10,000 words a week by adding 427 words a day to my normal daily 1000-word goal.”

 

  • Specific – The goal you set has to be very precise in order to help the person reading the goal understand and become certain about the expected impact or deliverables. Ask yourself questions to get this right, such as: What am I doing, why am I doing it, what do I need to do it right?

 

  • Measurable – As you craft the goal, you also need to use numbers that allow you to judge whether or not you’re reaching your objectives. Numbers like time, range, weight, steps, and so forth all make sense.

 

  • Attainable – Don’t bother setting impossible goals. If you have never walked an hour a day in your life, don’t start with that as your goal. Instead, start with five minutes and then craft a plan to add on a minute a day until you reach your goal of walking an hour a day.

 

  • Relevant – Also, each goal that you make has an overarching objective you’re trying to accomplish. For example, if you’re trying to write a novel writing the words is just one aspect of the novel publishing goal, but it is directly related.

 

  • Timely – Never leave a goal timeline open-ended. Even if you have to adjust the timeframe due to reality, the truth is we all fill up the time we give ourselves. If you give yourself three hours to check the mail, you’re going to take three hours. Tighten up your timelines to create a schedule that includes structured action that is easy to habituate – no motivation needed.

 

As you craft your goals, consider who will do the actions that help you reach the goal and think about what you really want to accomplish. When you do that and create a realistic time frame for it all to be done, you’re more likely actually to achieve the results you want and need.

Better Goal Setting Tips for Maximum Productivity

 

Posted on

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.

 

 

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.