13 Micro-Habits to Jump-start Your Productivity
Habits can often define our automatized lives. What we do, the order we do them in, any unconscious action we take is a reflection of the habits we have and the habits we have speak to the kind of person we are.
Whether this was a passively unintentionally gained habit or an intentional, deliberate, designed act, our habits reflect who we are and ultimately can take on a huge portion of our lives.
Most of us have the habit of brushing our teeth when we wake up and before we go to bed.
With a 79-year average life span brushing at four minutes per day, that is 79 days throughout a person's lifetime.
Reading Jari Roomer's 12 micro-habits to increase daily productivity reminded me to be conscious about what I want my designed life to be and how I can get there. I really liked most of the micro-habits identified and have tried so there's definite overlap. Check out Jari Roomer's medium post here to read his.
1) Plan Your Day The Night Before
Proper planning gives you a goal, an expectation, and little room for detracting. The days were I've planned beforehand versus no planning are night and day. Without a plan, I struggle to be on time, assign a realistic list of targets to reach, and have feelings of guilt for a vague sense of productivity and accomplishment that I'm trying to achieve.
When I have a plan for the next day and a goal list, I can trust the process and trust my night-before self to have chosen a reasonably accomplishable schedule.
Using time-blocking, ranking to-do's based on importance and priority and following through with my schedule are all needed, but step #1 is planning.
Planning my day the night before instead of in the morning gives me a plan for the morning. By doing so, I know exactly what needs to be done from the moment I wake up — and I can focus all my energy on executing the plan instead of still having to make the plan.
2) Review Your Long-Term Goals Daily
Keep your long-term goals front of mind. Life is crazy, add in children or a global pandemic on top of work stresses, family dynamics and everything else and it can be down right impossible to remember your own aspirations clearly.
When you take the conscious efforts to review your long-term goals daily, you remind yourself what is important and it gives you perspective on your daily actions and whether your choices bring you closer or further away from those long-term goals you say you have.
Reviewing your long-term goals daily also primes you to intentionally design your days with your long term goals in mind.
3) Identify Your Top 3 Daily Targets
Pick 3 daily targets you want to achieve. 3 wins that you can get today to make today a successful, productive day. When you clearly identify your priorities, your entire day will be much more focused and purposeful. You'll also have 3 things to check off. Now,
So, before the workday begins, take one minute and ask yourself the following question:
Which 3 things, if achieved today, get me a big step closer to reaching my long-term goals?
You want 3 clear wins that will move the needle towards your long-term goals, not simply busy work or pushing papers. We want real, genuine meaningful success.
4) Drink 1 Glass of Water Right After Waking Up
When you wake up, your mouth is dry, you're still groggy and may not be ready to wake up, let alone be productive. It is important to immediately hydrate your body.
Drink at least 1 glass of water right after waking up. It'll definitely kick-start your day,
Sure, you'll want to pee a ton. And in the beginning, you might feel bloated or stuffed and you can't even have breakfast but it's good for you. It's a simple habit, and chances are you might be like me and get dehydrated throughout the day so getting an early victory.
5) Do A 5-Minute Daily Review
As part of my evening routine, I aspire to review the day's events. Now, I won't lie and say that I have this habit in the bag, but I can 100% recognize the value in reflection, acknowledgement of achievements and re-iterating to get my perfectly productive day.
Here are the key questions I've asked myself and influenced by Jari Roomer
Did I accomplish my top 3 priorities of the day? If not, why not? What can I do differently tomorrow to ensure it is accomplished
Which tasks occupied my time and energy, but didn’t lead to meaningful results?
Which people and activities sparked the most energy and happiness today?
This 5-minute review keeps me growing. I am looking for optimizing even if I've done my day's schedule. And hopefully, it'll keep me growing and improving and working more efficiently for years to come!
6) Reach Out To Your Friends That You Admire
Admiration is a great attribute. I always find myself gravitating to people I admire and I become infatuated in figuring out why I am attracted to them and how I can gain their skills or attributes for myself.
What that means for me is to be deliberate with actively seeking out these people I admire. It'll allow me to grow in positive ways that I am designing for myself and I hopefully get inspired by them.
Remember, energy is infectious. The mindset and habits of the people you surround yourself with rub off. So design your mindset, habits and energy by surrounding yourself with people you wish to be like.
7) Start Your Days - Calmly
Something I've learned to do in the morning is wake up slowly and wake up calmly. I intentially wake up with time to spare, to make breakfast, to sit with a coffee, and sit in silence with my thoughts. I'm not a stickler for anti-phone use in the morning, but I do take my time to warm up, to be grateful for the day, and grateful for the day past.
Focus on your overall mission in the morning and what every day, every decision, every plan should or can do to bring you one step closer. The day will fill itself with busyness but you need to make sure you start your day with your head clear and your goals prioritized.
8) Use The Morning Strategically
Now, according to Jari Roomer, we should be using the morning for making and avoid meetings in order to do our best work. Jari recommends tasks that require maximum mental performance, willpower, and focus because your peak performance is in the morning. I'd argue that you need to know yourself and reflect about your long-term trends on your own. Sure, most people generally fit into that category, but it does require an honest reflection of yourself and your work.
If this fits you, strategically picking your creative time or intense focus times to align with your most productive mental performance time should produce your best work. If you are tired, fatigued, not yet awake, or in a brain fog, your work won't reflect your best performance.
Some would argue that if you are managing others, important meetings should in fact be scheduled during peak mental performance because the decision-making can have rippling effects on your entire organization; but if you are a creative or independent and the meetings are less impactful, perhaps those meetings should be in the afternoon instead.
9) Use The Afternoon For Logistics
So rather than describing it as "managing", I'd argue that afternoons should be for logistics - the day to day need-to-do's that perhaps aren't so mentally-draining. Answering emails, admin work, low-mental requirements but nevertheless important things to do daily. These can be those no-brainer filler tasks that are important but you can do while being distracted - kinda like washing the dishes, things that can pass the time and almost be meditative.
10)Disconnect During Focus Hours
Try your best to disconnect from your smartphone, your computer, or anything else that may detract from your focus time. Habits are important to us because they make us efficient. Our bodies can move without conscious effort because of these habits. We don't think about every step we take when we walk because we've become efficient movers but smartphones and technology hijack those habits and our neurochemicals. As a result, we can mindlessly scroll for hours, wind up down some YouTube rabbit hole or scroll through our favourite subreddits without meaning to.
If the goal for you is to intentionally spend your time on the things that move you closer to your aspirations, YouTube, subreddits and smartphones won't necessarily do that so make that conscious effort to protect yourself from these distractions.
I'm not saying smartphones are the devil but know that you won't die from disconnecting for 2-3 hours.
11) Have Fun
I emphatically support the idea of having fun. We're not going for some masochistic self-punishing, anti-fun, anti-phone, anti-freedom, scheduled regime here. But we are advocating for accountability to ourselves and our aspirations.
Things can 100% change, long-term goals can 100% change and if something no longer brings you joy, then you should definitely reflect and re-evaluate as needed.
The point being that if you have a personal conversation with yourself about your goals and you no longer have fun with your focused work, then that's something worth investigating.
I love working in a coffee shop and feeling like I'm making headway in my goals. I know I sacrifice social time with friends, mind-numbing vegging out on a couch with my wife and napping just cause I have nothing else to do, but I thoroughly enjoy making content, trying new things, and pushing myself.
So just make sure you do enjoy it. Plus, part of the whole scheduling your day habit is that you can build in dedicated time to do those very things when you want to.
12) Focus On The Growth
Perspective is important. I think depending on what you are aspiring to do, it is important to check your biases and have perspective because false narratives and negative talk has probably killed a lot of amazing ideas in the world.
It's always hard to start. It's always hard to acknowledge your successes and we are taught to think of all the what-if's that could go wrong.
Instead of thinking of what could go wrong, it's important to also spend time thinking about what could go right.
Start acknowledging how far you've come, how much you've learned already, and how much you can do as you gain skills. For whatever reason, there are a lot of biases to assume natural talent over perseverance. If you're a painter or musician, it's because of talent and not hard work. But every moment you are trying, you are persevering and you are focusing on your craft is a moment of growth.
So focus on that. Don't focus on the pain, the hurdles and challenges you anticipate along the way. Think of the growth you've already achieved and the growth you will continue to achieve.
13) Actions Matter More
Walk the way if you can talk the talk. Actions matter more than any hypothetical that you think. Don't just read, understand and forget. Implement what you learned even if you can't implement everything.
13 tips is too many? Pick one or two that you can implement starting today. Just do it. A company decided to and went from $877 million to $9.2 billion in the span of a 10-year campaign.
