How many days have you spent doing nothing, thinking how you are simply wasting your life away? We know you have; most of us do. Come New Year or birthday, many of us start contemplating how we are finally going to turn our lives around to make better use of our time, but these plans or resolutions never work. Why? Because we never really want them to! If we really wanted them to work, then would we really wait for a special occasion to improve our lives? Don’t you think right now is as good a moment as any to change the direction your life is going in?
Are you ready to turn your life around? Do you want to be productive in life so you can achieve whatever you hope to? Then, here are some simple things that will help you in becoming the person you want to be.
#1. Prepare A To-Do List
One simple to-do list can help you deal with so many things in your life, be it missing deadlines or forgetting to finish an important task. Once you have made a list of things you need to do in order of the priority, you can go about executing one task after the other, from the one that needs your immediate attention towards the one that does not. A to-do list can be the breakthrough you need to turn your life around!
#2. Reward Yourself For Completing Tasks
You may think that rewards are the perfect way to train your kids but these not only work perfectly on your little ones, also on you. You can reward yourself even for trivial tasks. For instance, you can treat yourself to a delicious cup of hot coffee once you have checked out your emails. Rewards do not have to be monetary, but just something you relish. You will be surprised how wondrous these small packets of motivation can be for your productivity.
#3. Stop Procrastinating
Perhaps most of you would agree that the biggest problem in our lives is that you spend away your precious time delaying and postponing tasks that need your immediate attention. This is the hurdle you need to overcome at the earliest. This might be one of the hardest things you have ever done, but this may also be the only thing you require to turn your life around.
What to bid adieu to your habit of procrastination? This is how you do it.
#4. Create Goals And Make It A Habit
Some of us know that their life is going in the wrong direction, but they also are not aware of where they want to take it. And that is the bigger concern. Goals are very crucial in life. They not only motivate us to move ahead in life, but they can also be a source of immense self-belief to live our lives to the fullest. They offer us focus, the lack of which can leave us in a downward spiral to the place that we dread. In addition to that, you need to make a habit of setting goals. On achieving one, create new and commence the efforts for realizing those.
#5. Share Your Goals With Others
This may sound funny but merely setting goals for future may not be enough. You need to share these with someone you trust and can confide with. You are way more likely to achieve your goals when you tell someone about them than you would otherwise be. This person can be your sibling or your best friend who knows all your secrets and supports you whenever you need them to. You can even start a blog and share your progress with your readers on a regular basis.
#6. Showcase Your Success
You feel proud when you achieve something great, don’t you? Achievements not only make one feel proud, but they also act as a motivational tool, encouraging you to work even harder in future in order to see the same greatness again. You can talk to your significant other or your close friends about it; anybody close who will be happy for you in these good times. When people see you succeeding, they build high expectations for you in future, and these expectations act as a motivational fuel for the future.
#7. Plan Your Day A Day Before
Planning your day in advance can have a tremendous effect on your productivity. They say every minute you spend on planning a task helps you save 10 in its execution. Even if it saves five, we say do it. When you know exactly what you need to do, you save a lot of time that would otherwise be invested in administration tasks like contemplating the next thing to do after completing one task. In return, it boosts your productivity and you get a lot more done in the same period of time.
#8. Kick Start Your Day
Your mood in the morning tends to have a phenomenal effect on the way you are going to behave during the entire day. So, if you start the day on a positive note, then you will be happy throughout the day, and perhaps you already know what happens when you do it the other way around. Therefore, it is better to commence each morning on a high note by doing something productive. You can make a morning ritual, a task that gets your spirits up to face the challenges ahead and be productive through the day.
#9. Become Single Minded
The human brain has not evolved to focus on multiple tasks at one time. When you try to do it, this is hampering the quality of your work, and you will end up making mistakes quite often. You can learn from perfectionists; they never focus on more than one task at one point in time. They pick one thing and move on to the next when they are sure that they have completed it to the best of their abilities. Also, indulging in multiple tasks simultaneously makes us believe that we have a lot on our platter and clutters our life and mind.
Want to know more about why being single-minded is good for you? Check this out!
#10. Learn To Manage Your Time
How many times in school or college have people told you about the significance of effective time management? Too many, right? If that advice and lessons did not have even a little effect on you that time, then this should be when you finally get it. Time management is crucial for every aspect of your life for you to move ahead. Besides from helping you in your career or professional life, it also assists in managing personal life and finding the balance between the two.
#11. Delegate
They say that if you want something done right, then do it yourself. But, that's not always the case. Trivial tasks that do not require you to pay much attention and can be executed by somebody else can be assigned ahead. This way, you will have more time for the things that are more crucial to finish them to perfection. All successful people in the world, or should we say, leaders, are great at delegation.
#12. Set Deadlines On Everything
Are you one of those who get things done only when they see the deadline approaching? Then why not set a deadline for everything you do? When you know how much time you can afford to spend on one task and when you need to start working on the next, you tend to develop discipline. Also, deadlines also spark a competitive streak in you and help you keep pushing forward to meet the expectations that you have bestowed upon yourself.
#13. Take Breaks
This may sound like a conundrum, like how can stepping away from work help you become more productive, but that is how it really works. Unless you are indulging into something that is manual or can be done without putting too many thoughts into it, then your brain requires regular breaks to keep itself from being overworked. More can be achieved in less time, only if you work smart. Breaks can help you keep yourself from being bored as well as from feeling overworked.
#14. Develop A Positive Attitude
Another determining factor in your productivity is your attitude. You will never be able to be the best at anything if your heart is not really into it and if your heart is into something, then it will seem like something that you want to do, not what you have to do. Attitude determines everything.
Wondering how exactly to develop a positive attitude in life? Here is the answer!
So, this is how you become productive in life and achieve your goals. If there is anything that you want to share with us, like some tips that you think can help our other readers become more productive, then you can use the comment box below to share your thoughts. We would love to pick your mind.
