Five Simple Rituals to Start Your Day Mindfully

"Make each day your masterpiece." John Wooden

I used to begin my day by pressing the snooze button about four times, scrolling through Instagram and email for a few minutes, dragging myself to the shower, smearing some makeup on my face and running out the door without breakfast. While it might have gotten me out the door in a timely manner, it did nothing for my mental well-being!

Recently I started to begin my day in a more mindful way. I've noticed that when I take time to center myself in the morning, that calm energy reverberates throughout the rest of my day. Morning self-care practices help us stay more calm, centered and focused. In turn, this helps us to be more efficient, effective and creative. Commit to at least one of the below rituals for thirty days and see if your mornings aren't completely transformed.

Below are 5 simple self-care rituals that you can easily integrate into your morning routine:

1. Intention Setting. Before I get out of bed or check my phone in the morning, I like to set an intention. "Intention setting" is different from goal setting. An intention is an expression of our soul's desire for that day. It could be something like: "Allow me to accept what life brings to me with equanimity and grace," "Allow me to make the time to be creative today" or "Provide me the space to take life less seriously today."

2. Meditation. I've found nothing more effective to start my day off on a positive note than the practice of meditation. Meditation also has a cumulative effect: the more often you practice, the greater the results. A daily meditation practice has helped me cultivate inner-peace and has given me more access to my creativity.

3. Gratitude. A gratitude list is a great way to both start and end your day. Making the time to jot down three things that you're grateful for every morning is a quick and easy way to connect with your higher self. There is even a journal specifically formatted for writing daily gratitude lists. It's called The Five Minute Journal and I highly recommend it if you're someone who would like to start a gratitude journal but have never done so before.

4. Affirmation cards. I am a huge fan of affirmation cards. Many "self-help gurus" make them, but my favorites are Louise Hay's Power Thought Cards. Every morning, after my meditation, I like to hold these cards in my hands and ask that I be guided to pick a card that will serve me today. I then close my eyes and shuffle the cards until I feel moved to stop. I pick one out of the deck, open my eyes and read the card. One of things that I like most about these cards is that unlike Tarot Cards, all of the cards in this deck are positive and inspirational.

5. Mindful Eating. Many of us don't take the time in the morning to sit down for five to ten minutes and simply eat our breakfast. And even if we do, it's often in front of the computer or our smartphone. It's a gift to your body and mind to eat mindfully and simply focus on the action of chewing before getting caught up in the daily rat race. We place a huge value on multi-tasking in our culture, but there are enormous mental benefits to single-tasting.

While you often can't control the events in your life, you can help yourself approach your day with some self-care. If we start our day mindfully, we have a much better chance of staying centered no matter what the day brings.

http://ezinearticles.com/?Five-Simple-Rituals-to-Start-Your-Day-Mindfully&id=9462914

Want to Be Successful? Quit Wasting Your Brain.

The most productive time of the day is not early morning. Work productivity has absolutely nothing to do with your daily rituals or habits. And the truth is, your success probably has little to do with productivity in the first place.

Productivity is about efficiency and output. That may count for something if you make cars or semiconductor chips, but for the overwhelming majority of you, productivity doesn’t mean a damn thing.

If being creative matters to you, and it should, it might surprise you to know that you’re probably most innovative when you’re tired. I often have epiphanies when I’m half asleep, during an exhausting workout, or in the shower … not a weird shower, mind you, just a normal one. But that’s neither here nor there.

The thing is, we’re all different. And if you listen to your own body and instincts you’ll do fine. Unfortunately, most of you are much too busy binging on all sorts of online nonsense and distraction to pay any attention to what your body and your gut are telling you.

The great irony is, cavemen had all that figured out. They awoke with the sun, ate when there was food, and slept when they got tired. They somehow managed to accomplish all that with a brain about a third of the size of yours. And everything worked out fine ... as long as they avoided those saber-toothed tigers.  

You know, the only thing that distinguishes modern man from caveman is our highly evolved neocortex. Honestly folks, do you really think humans developed the capacity for complex reasoning so we can sit on our butts and ponder stuff that a caveman or even a frog does without even thinking? Of course not.

A great mind is a terrible thing to waste. So quit wasting yours. And quit wasting the precious time you have to build your career and business worrying about stupid nonsense like what time you get up, how you eat breakfast, your sleep habits, and what kind of showers you take.

Look, you’re supposed to be an entrepreneur, right? And that’s all about business, right? So what do you say we take a step back and look at this logically. When it comes to business, the only important time of day is the time you spend actually working. And the only habits that matter are your work habits.

That’s right, nothing else matters … unless, of course, you’re slacking off when you should be working. So get to work. And for the record, here are five questions that enormous brain of yours needs to answer if you want to make something of yourself and have a successful business someday.

What customer problem do you solve?

I don’t care how much you love doing something or how passionate you are about doing it, if you don’t come up with a big problem that customers will pay to have solved, your entrepreneurial career will be very short-lived.

What’s your solution and what’s its value proposition?

If your products and services don’t offer a far superior value proposition with respect to the competition, then you’ve got what’s called a commodity product. That means you’re going to be slugging it out on price. That’s not a good place to be.

How are you going to win and keep customers?

Even the best solution doesn’t always win. You still need a plan to reach potential customers, win the business, keep customers happy, and put up competitive barriers because competition always goes where the business is.

How are you going to gain market share and scale?

You’re always creating a new market, expanding the overall market, or taking market share from others. Whichever it is, you need strategies and capital to do it. Market share isn’t just costly to lose. It’s costly to gain, as well.

How are you going to fund your growth?

This is where most entrepreneurs and small business owners fall short. You have to have a clear plan with reasonable assumptions to fund your business as it grows. Otherwise, you’ll run out of cash – easily the most common reason businesses fail.

If you come up with those five strategies and successfully execute, I guarantee you’ll do quite well for yourself. If you don’t, you’d better keep working on it until you do, because none of them are optional if you want to get anywhere on your own.  

So quit screwing around on stuff a caveman or even a slimy amphibian can do and put those frontal lobes to work building an actual business.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/243805

How The Most Successful People Manage Their Time

"Where does the time go?" I say it. I'm sure you say it a lot.
               

We seek work-life balance but it seems there's never enough time to get it all done.

And yet we all know there are people who accomplish a lot more than we do in a day — and they don't have magic powers.

Here's how you can get tons of stuff accomplished during the week, feel less stressed and even have more fun on the weekend.

1. Do a time log.

Interviewing so many successful people, what did she hear some version of over and over? They all seem obsessed with one question: What else could I do with that hour? 

They plan their time, track their time and are always thinking about the opportunity cost of their time.

The first question you need to ask is "Where is my time actually going?" Not where you think it's going, where is it actually going.

This does not involve leaning back in your chair and kinda sorta guessing about what you vaguely remember doing.

Write down what you do for every hour of the day.

Let's just say seeing clearly in black and white how you spend your time can be sobering. Or, in some cases, downright depressing. But it works.

You can't trust your head when it comes to time. You need to be accountable. Dieters who wrote down everything they ate lost an extra six pounds.

Via What the Most Successful People Do at Work: "One study of a year-long weight loss program, published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics in 2012, found that women who kept a food journal lost about 6 pounds more than those who did not. Writing down what you eat keeps you accountable for what you put in your mouth. Likewise, writing down how you spend your time keeps you accountable for the hours that pass, whether or not you're conscious of them."

There are other benefits to doing a time log. It helps you figure out how long things really take versus your optimistic underestimates.

Here's what Laura told me: "It's just a matter of observation and saying "What is it that I repeatedly do in my life, and how long did it really take each of those times?" If that regular Monday 10 a.m. meeting is scheduled for an hour but it has never taken less than 90 minutes, then you need to be realistic and stop scheduling stuff for 11:00."

The other benefit that comes from doing a time log is you can see the optimal windows for you to accomplish certain tasks.

Are you sharper in the morning? (Most people are.) Then you can schedule "deep work" for that time.

So you've started a time log (and you've probably spent some time crying after reading it) and now you're ready to spend your hours better.

What's the next step? You need a plan. And not some little one either.

2. Plan the whole week.

In a study of CEO's what correlated with an increase in sales? Not how much time they had, but how much time had been planned out.

Via What the Most Successful People Do at Work: A Short Guide to Making Over Your Career: "Preliminary analysis from CEOs in India found that a firm's sales increased as the CEO worked more hours. But more intriguingly, the correlation between CEO time use and output was driven entirely by hours spent in planned activities."

Georgetown professor and super-organizer Cal Newport agrees: To-do lists aren't enough. Things need to be assigned hours to really get done.

How do you create your plan? Think about two things: what are you good at and what makes you happy?

Successful people spend as much time as possible on their "core competency" and ignore, minimize or outsource everything else.1

They spend time on that thing they're best at which produces meaningful results.

Writers need to be writing. Accountants need to be working with numbers. And everything else (like email and meetings) just gets in the way.

Laura also suggests creating a long list of things that bring you joy. Yes, you need to write them down.

Might sound silly but by having an actual list it's easier to remember them and slot them into your schedule vs. waiting for serendipity.

So you're putting your plan together. What's another secret of successful people that delivers results over the long haul?

ShutterstockSpend your mornings doing things you put off the rest of the week.

3. Morning rituals are for things that don't have to happen.

Morning rituals are for those things that are important but not urgent. Long term planning. Exercise.

The stuff we know we should do… but perpetually put off. These things don't have a hard deadline and nobody will shout at us if they don't happen.

Via What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast: "The best morning rituals are activities that don't have to happen and certainly don't have to happen at a specific hour. These are activities that require internal motivation… The best morning rituals are activities that, when practiced regularly, result in long-term benefits."

Research shows we have more willpower in the morning.

One of the successful people Laura spoke to said: "Every day I have a job but in the morning, I think I have a career."

Mornings are the time to make progress on those vital long term goals.

Time log: check. Weekly plan: check. Morning ritual: check. What else requires some forethought? Fun.

4. Yes, you even need to plan the weekend.

Here's where people freak out. They don't want to plan their free time. But if you're serious about your leisure time, then take it seriously.

I'm not talking about planning work or chores. I'm talking about planning fun — as in making sure you have some.

How many weekends have blown by where you didn't get off the couch and, frankly, it wasn't all that memorable? Exactly.

Research shows we're happier when we plan our free time and that "doing nothing" doesn't make us happy.

More importantly, studies have shown that you often don't do what makes you happiest — you do what is easy. So you need to plan if you want to have fun.

What's a weekend plan look like? Nothing draconian. Laura says you just want 3-5 "anchor events" to make sure you're having a good time.

Here's Laura: "Just three to five anchor events can really make the difference between feeling that a weekend was spent well, and that a weekend merely happened. And these don't have to be huge things. It could just be, "I'm going to go for a run on Saturday morning. I'm going to try get together with this friend on Saturday evening. I'm going to go to church on Sunday morning."

Looking to be happier? By planning fun stuff ahead of time you get to anticipate it. And research shows anticipation makes us very happy.

Best part is even if you don't follow through and do the anchor event, you already got the anticipatory happiness. Happiness and laziness!

Via What the Most Successful People Do on the Weekend: "One study by several Dutch researchers, published in the journal Applied Research in Quality of Life in 2010, found that vacationers were happier than people who didn't take holiday trips. That finding is hardly surprising. What is surprising is the timing of the happiness boost… The happiness boost came before the trips, stretching out for as much as two months beforehand as the holiday goers imagined their excursions."

Weekend fun is locked in. What's the most vital part of insuring you're ready for the work week to start again?

5. How to conquer the Sunday night blues.

You know the weekend is over and tomorrow it's back to work. Instead of being filled with dread, plan something awesome for Sunday night.

Here's Laura: "Even people who like their jobs can succumb to this: "Oh god the weekend's over!" One way around that is planning something low-key but enjoyable for Sunday night — anything you can look forward to Sunday afternoon instead of thinking about Monday morning."

Research shows Sunday is the saddest day of the week. Plan something fun ahead of time and that doesn't have to be the case.

Okay, we've got some great tips. Let's pull this together.

Sum up

Here's what you can learn about time management from very successful people:

1. Do a time log. See how long things take and when your best windows are.
2. Plan the whole week. Focus on your core competency and what makes you happy.
3. Have a morning ritual that gets you closer to your long term goals.
4. Set 3-5 anchor events for the weekend.
5. Plan something fun for Sunday night.

168 — that's how many hours we all have every week. We need to get out of the mindset of "I don't have time."

We all have the same number of hours. Period. It's what you choose to do with those hours that will shape your entire life.

To quote a video game franchise I worked on a while back: We all make choices. But in the end, our choices make us.

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-successful-people-manage-their-time-2014-9?utm_content=buffer4fcab&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer