Tag: success

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Life Progress Self-awareness

15 Priceless Productivity Tips for Procrastinators

Productivity Tips for Procrastinators
Reading Time: 3 minutes.

This post first appeared on the 1st things 1st blog.

What a paradox that to write about productivity for those who always postpone things, I am procrastinating myself while scrolling productivity and business tips on Twitter. The problem is that I shouldn’t focus on productivity to be productive. Instead, I should focus on my goals. And develop effective habits.

The trick is just to start doing what you planned. And so I started, and in this article, I will give you a glimpse of those habits that you should develop to live a more thriving and meaningful life.

Know your WHY’s

Always be aware of why you are doing what you are doing. You will always have very little motivation if your reasons are vague.

Do you work just for survival? Or for financial stability? Or for recognition? Or for impact? Or for self-expression? 

Finish what you started

Decide in advance which of your projects are to be finished and which of them are just experiments.

Don’t start working on new projects until the old ones are completed. Learn the habit of getting things done.

Focus on your strengths

Nobody is perfect. Everyone has their flaws. As well as their strengths. 

Don’t be sorry about what you can’t do. Identify what you can do best, and make that even better. 

Ask others for help when it’s too hard to handle yourself or takes too much time.

Start now with what you have

Perfect conditions will never exist. So you have to start doing what you want or need to do now. Not next month, not next week, not tomorrow. But now.

Start ideating, prioritizing, and planning. Take the first steps. Even if that’s for 20 minutes. The goal is to build productive habits.

Create TODO lists

Have three TODO lists: “Must do,” “Should do,” and “Want to do.” Execute tasks from those lists according to your priorities and energy levels.

Don’t waste your time on “wants” if your “musts” are not done yet.

Break big tasks into smaller chunks

Sometimes your tasks are so huge that you just get overwhelmed and perplexed. Where should you start? How can you plan and estimate?

The trick here is to split the big task into smaller ones and evaluate them separately.

Find your prime biological time

Identify your most productive time of day. Maybe it’s your mornings, maybe afternoons, or maybe nights.

It’s your Power Hours that you should use for the most critical or creative work.

Schedule daily work time in blocks

Split your days into segments and dedicate those segments to different types of work. For example, 13:30 – 15:00 is for writing and replying to emails.

Do only one thing at a time. Don’t switch contexts. You will be more productive, focussing on only one type of work at a time.

Gamify your work

Try not to break a chain by working on something for a regular time daily. For example, building something for 1 hour every day.

Or, if you have some tedious tasks to do, decide on some point system to reward yourself for a certain amount of completed tasks.

Choose peace, not conflict

When communicating, aim to be calm, understanding, and harmonious. Unnecessary conflicts just drain your energy and make you less than productive.

Usually, complicated people are so because of their difficult pasts. So be aware of that, and it will help you be more peaceful.

Have an accountability partner

Struggling on your dreams alone might be difficult. There are a million reasons not to do something you wish to have done. The tiredness after the primary job, wishing to spend time with your friends or family, exciting TV show, or a new series on Netflix.

Don’t make excuses, and have a friend to talk with about your progress. This will make you more inspired and accountable against that person.

Control your devices

Don’t fall into the trap of digital devices. Instead, make smartphones, computers, and TV work for you, not control you.

Switch off most notifications not to distract you. Then, when you need more focus, go to Airplane mode.

Install apps that let you prioritize, plan your time, focus better.

Focus on the 20% most important tasks

The Pareto principle says that by doing just 20% of the most critical tasks, you can achieve 80% of the impact.

Identify which tasks make this 20% of your lists and focus on them.

Work hard on your mindset

Life is as finite and fatal as you define it. You can have a fixed mindset, thinking that you have developed during your childhood and youth, and nothing can be changed afterward.

Or you can be in a growth mindset thinking that you can continuously develop yourself, survive mistakes and learn from them, and work on life-changing projects.

Hold yourself accountable – drive your own life

Don’t wait for someone else to fix your life and make your dreams come true. Be the driver of your own life.

Design your life, take action, and go forward!

Invitation

There is more to that. If you learned something new and want to dive deeper, check these concise productivity tips I recently published. There are many more tips there (80 to be exact) for your goal setting, motivation, self-awareness, priorities, planning, efficiency, and growth.

Cover photo by cottonbro

Categories
Learning Life Self-awareness

The Cycle of Long-term Success (UPDATED)

The Cycle of Long-term Success
Reading Time: 2 minutes.

This post first appeared on the 1st things 1st blog.

One kind of events in life happens spontaneously, unplanned, powered by intuition, and seeming random. Calling a friend, buying a chocolate bar, or sitting down on a bench at a fountain doesn’t require special preparation.

Another kind of events requires making hard decisions because of the urge to gain something huge or the risk of losing something important. In those cases, it’s better to get prepared.

In life, as in nature, everything happens in cycles. Previously I introduced you to the cycle of long-term success as I saw it at that moment. Today, I have refined the mentioned cycle, and now it consists of these 5 steps: research, prioritize, plan, act, reflect.

1. Research

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.
– Zora Neale Hurston

First of all, before taking a measured action, you would need to find out what your choices are today. You can use a search engine, Wikipedia, references, podcasts, magazines, books, or anything else that provides you with information that you could utilize in your field of focus. Gather information with the intent to incorporate it into your activities.

2. Prioritize

“If everything is important, then nothing is.”
– Patrick M. Lencioni

There are several ways to set priorities for your activities. You can use the flexible and mighty prioritizer “1st things 1st”, decision matrices in Excel sheets, Eisenhower Matrix on a piece of paper, or maybe just selecting the first several priorities intuitively.

3. Plan

If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.
– Jim Rohn

Put your most important activities on the schedule. You can use Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, monday.com, any other scheduling app, or even an analog calendar on your wall or in your Moleskine. Try not to have more than 3 activities in a day. Book yourself or your colleagues for the vital work to do.

4. Act

Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
– William James

Now it’s time to do what you have planned. Have a necessary meeting or a zoom call, speak, write, or perform what’s on your list today this hour.

5. Reflect

It is only by reflecting on the past that one can create a better future.
– Rithy Panh

If you got positive results, celebrate the wins. If you failed, see what you can learn from your mistakes. The next time will be better. Now go back to the first step and do the new research.

Final words

If you master the cycle of long-term success, you form a habit of success. Whether you win or lose, you gain experience and become excellent at what you do.

Cover photo by Ian Stauffer

Categories
Self-awareness

The Cycle of Long-term Success

The Cycle of Long-term Success
Reading Time: 2 minutes.

This post first appeared on the 1st things 1st blog.

In my younger days, I was obsessed with finding the formula for happiness and success. Why do some people achieve more than others? Why do some people suffer when others enjoy their lives? What is the secret of some people’s advantage against some others? What do successful people do differently from the poor ones?

At some point, I realized that happiness and success are two different things. Happiness is something that you feel yourself, whereas success is something how others perceive you. There are happy people without significant achievements as well as successful but stressed and depressed people.

Success might be random, like a toss of a coin. That will likely be short-term. Have you heard that 70% of lottery winners spend all their money just in a few years after receiving the big amounts? There has to be something else. Something better than randomness.

As of now, I know that circumstances are one of the factors. But mostly everything depends on the mindset. A human being can change their mind and then be able to change the conditions or adapt to them.

Success happens through forming better habits and sticking to your goals.

As a great thinker and author, James Clear, once tweeted

There are 3 primary drivers of results in life:

1) Your luck (randomness).
2) Your strategy (choices).
3) Your actions (habits).

Only 2 of the 3 are under your control.

But if you master those 2, you can improve the odds that luck will work for you rather than against you.

Did you notice that in life, everything happens in cycles?

I want to introduce you to the cycle of long-term success as I see it today.

The Cycle of Long-term Success
  1. Everything begins with prioritization. It can be some productive work using mind mapping, TODO lists, decision matrixes, and other tools. It can be something that you do intuitively or meditatively in your head. Or it can be something that your managers and bosses do for you.
  2. Then there is planning. It’s dividing big tasks into small ones, assigning time for different tasks, deciding who will do what, choosing appropriate tools. Maybe you’ll also be using Trello, Monday, or Clubhouse, to name a few.
  3. Now it’s time for action. Do what you have to do to move towards your goal. Try to make progress. Try to fit the timetable. Remove all the bottlenecks. Make that call. Write that email. Create that masterpiece. Travel to that destination.
  4. The last step of the cycle is celebrating your successes. Or, if your actions failed, you have something from what to learn and improve for the next time.

And the cycle goes on and on again.

Cover photo by Grant Ritchie