Thirty Minutes to a More Vibrant You!

In today’s fast paced world, we are told that whatever we give our focus to will take precedence. So why not make your choices even more efficient and effective by taking a midday cat nap, without the coffee. That way you can lead yourself to feeling revived for the rest of the day and produce work that would be good. Better. Or great. Instead of simply mediocre, because you were drained and your energy was sapped.

According to Tom Rath, the author of Eat Move Sleep in his introductory chapter of the book, labelled “The Basics,” you should sleep longer to get more done. Certainly back in college or university, it was easy to contemplate pulling an all-nighter because of some impending assignment or essay that needed to be done. Now, however with so much on our plate, it would be unwise to discredit the benefits of getting a full night sleep. Be it seven or eight hours long.

In fact, I have found that in addition to this, taking a few minutes off your day, say between 12:00 and 3:00, just to close your eyes, can provide an energy boost that restore some depleted energy. Set the alarm if you must. Turn down the volume on your phone. But whatever you do, make sure to close your eyes and tune out the outside world – for as little as fifteen or as much as thirty minutes – and see if you don’t feel mentally refreshed. Once again free to combat any problem, or overcome any obstacle and reclaim your day.

Two Steps towards Making Meaningful Progress!

Usually when you are doing something, your aim is to achieve your goal. However, sometimes this narrow-minded determination might pidgin hold you into getting a certain outcome, and this may prevent you from seeing other opportunities. In which case, it would be wise to set aside some prep time to reflect on your project. Are you doing the right thing, right now? Do you know what your next move will/should be? Or do you need to consult with someone else? Either way, making time available in your calendar can help you achieve your goal.

Reflect and Make the time available for what you want to do.

During this time you can make inroads by chunking down your big project into smaller more manageable sections. This for me would mean writing or editing a paragraph, page or chapter of a novel, short story or poem.

Or if you’re more of an acrobat, who has no qualms about handling a few projects at a time, using one of the ‘Heath methods’ mentioned in Decisive, you can handle 5 or six projects at once. The idea behind this of course, would be that any meaningful feedback that you get from any projects, can then be applied to all of them in turn. And in that way you will be able to create a great body of work versus just one project. Also by doing this, you will be able to get some distance from the various pieces of work; something that is need beneficial when rewriting or re-working ideas.

Yet no matter how you choose to work on your projects, nobody can discount the benefits of having a systematic approach. Make sure and set monthly goals for yourself, so that you will have something towards which you are striving. Penalize or reward yourself adequately. Say a cupcake or a movie, depending on the amount of work achieved. Or take away tv time, expensive dinners and parties, when you’ve slacked off too much, while bearing in mind that incremental change is good. And if you persist, eventually, in the end  it will make a whole lot of difference.