1. Begin With a Tech-Free Dawn

Before checking any device in the morning, take a full hour for yourself.

It sets the tone for the day and gives you more control over yourself. It doesn’t matter whether it’s meditation, reading, or a morning walk. The most crucial part is not using any type of digital device.

Technology can wait; your well-being shouldn’t.

I started integrating this habit into my life over a year ago and immediately noticed the difference in mood, additional time in the morning, and more mindful moments.

I don’t want to be some clerk who tells you that using a phone is bad and that you should throw it away. It’s just a question of balance.

Try to notice where your mind leaves your head and starts floating inside of social media. That’s the exact time you need to stop.

All the devices around us are made to make overall life easier, not to be a part of it. You should use your phone or laptop to be more productive and solve some problems, not spend half the day going through new emails.

Think of it.

2. Visualize the End in Mind

Instead of writing a to-do list, visualize completing each task.

This not only embeds the task more tightly in your memory but can also motivate you as you’ve ‘seen’ the positive outcome.

The whole question of productivity is not about showing that you’re busy, it’s about the impact of the completed work.

You should embrace the feeling of completing the task and make the highest impact with it, rather than just do it for the check.

That was my problem for most of my life. I’ve been using many to-do list apps just to complete this check. It’s way worse than visualizing and understanding the endpoint of this task.

Do not just read 30 pages, you need to understand how the information from these 30 pages will help you achieve your goals further.

Do not just go to the gym for an hour; understand how specifically this workout will push you forward to a better body.

I hope you get my point.

3. Create Productive Tunes

The human brain is an incredibly powerful computer, and every computer can be programmed in a specific way. Here’s how we can do it for our success.

Start by creating more positive triggers in your life. For instance, let’s start with the working environment. If you come to the co-working space, you immediately feel that you ‘must’ work too!

When you constantly turn on specific music in the background, it makes working much easier and more pleasurable. The best examples are lo-fi beats, no words, no complex chords, only the simple beats that make you more relaxed.

For me, it worked perfectly. I started drinking coffee only while working on the web designs. I started writing only after a 20-minute walk. I started listening to lo-fi and integrated a bunch of other triggers that increased my productivity.

It’s not hard to find yours and implement them as well. You just need to try several ways, find something that you love, and combine it with your main tasks. As a result, you’ll get the best way to achieve anything with pleasure!

4. Unschedule

Instead of scheduling tasks, schedule breaks.

It’s a pretty easy concept, and you can’t believe how powerful that is.

The gaps between your productivity zones make you conscious and mindful. It’s really crucial, including the fact that most of the day we live on autopilot.

This inverse thinking makes you value working periods more and ensures you get regular breaks.

In other words, it’s much better to work for 3 hours, then take a long break, and then work again.

It seems like an addition to the Pomodoro concept, where you take small breaks every 25 minutes but focus on a specific time of the day.

It’s also a great way to break bad habits.

When you want to stop scrolling through social media for the whole day, you can just schedule a specific time in your day when you’ll spend an hour or two scrolling.

It doesn’t hurt your overall productivity, and you start to procrastinate less.

5. Seek Constant Knowledge

The problem in our current society is that we’re consuming tons of information that’s mostly useless. We constantly learn new facts, but it probably wouldn’t make any difference in our lives. It’s an illusion of learning, but real learning is much more interesting!

Many successful people spend around 4 hours a week learning something new. You can dedicate at least 10 minutes of every day to learning and see the progress over time!

It can be anything, starting with new knowledge in your professional sphere and ending with some absolutely unrelated stuff.

Take me as an example, I’m a UI/UX designer and have been in this sphere for over 3 years. For this whole time, I’ve been creating many different web and mobile designs and got a lot of positive feedback.

However, time has changed, and now I strive for new opportunities. One of these opportunities is Apple Vision Pro, which has an absolutely new concept of designing and developing.

It’s much harder to design for a spatial world than for the usual screens. The previous concepts don’t work, you have to turn around your views on the design and start everything from the beginning. Exciting, isn’t it?

And you can’t believe how much I love it. I always like to solve new problems and break new barriers, so the XR design is my new direction.

I hope you’ll find something that works for you. It can be something trending or something that’s been around for a while; it doesn’t matter. It matters only that you’ll spend a little bit of time learning it repeatedly and seeing how it affects other aspects of your life.

6. Network Beyond Screens

What is the purpose of knowledge if you can’t share it with others? I think that networking is one of the most crucial parts of everyone’s life. It’s essential for us to meet new people and always communicate with them.

Networking also puts your life on a new level. After talking to many intelligent people, you’ll start looking at things from different angles. Every new meeting can bring you something new and give you a bunch of new opportunities. Communicating mindfully with your comrades will also make you less stressed and depressed.

So yeah, networking is important, now let’s take a look at different types of it.

Engage in face-to-face interactions, attend workshops, or join clubs.

Real-world interactions are always better than online ones. However, it’s much easier to build online friends first.

That’s why I recently created my own community related to entrepreneurship and self-development on Discord! Join now and help grow it further.

7. Play with the ‘What If’ Game

The ability to always strive to understand how everything works.

We always ask questions when we’re young. The world seems exciting and unknown to us, so we want to know a little bit more about some aspects of it.

Sometimes this curiosity can lead to dangerous output, and sometimes it can lead to amazing moments of realization.

The problem is that the current world doesn’t look as exciting for us as it did before. We already know all the basics and how economics works; we don’t need anything else. We only do what we have to, and that’s it.

However, this needs to be changed, and here’s how.

Regularly challenge your beliefs and thoughts. Ask yourself, “What if?” about situations both big and small.

For example, “What if I tried a different approach?” “What if I took a risk?” This encourages flexibility in thinking and boosts creativity.

Another way to embrace the curiosity in your mind is to start doing something new. When I just started learning to code, I was incredibly curious and asked literally every possible question.

And I couldn’t stop until I found answers to this question, this process is called progress. The process of finding the problem and solving it.

We live to solve problems, no matter how big or small they are. However, before solving them, we first need to identify these problems ourselves. The best and only way to do this is to ask the right questions.

Literally, nothing would be invented if we didn’t ask questions. Think of it.