Energy, not time, is the basis of productivity. Having all the hours in the day won’t do you good if you’re exhausted from most of it.
Your habits define your energy levels. If you have good habits, you will feel energized and more resistant to physical and mental exhaustion. If your habits are out of sync, you may enter a cycle where you feel worse and worse until you can barely keep up.
You can practice nine habits this year to boost your energy levels.
Habit 1: Sleep early
Sleep is the foundation of your energy. If you don’t get enough sleep, you’ll start to underperform.
While some claim they work better on six hours of sleep or less, research shows they are wrong. Seven to eight hours of sleep is essential to maintain your cognitive abilities over the long term.
Sleep deprivation may have reached a mental plateau for some people, meaning they feel slightly tired throughout the day but don’t think they’re getting worse. An interesting experiment showed that sleep deprivation led to a steady decline in mental performance, even though the subjects felt stable.
Try this: go to bed before 10 p.m. every night, including weekends, for the next 30 days.
Habit #2: Exercise every day
Exercise is a long-term investment in your energy levels. It’s easy to do without in the short term, but over time it will reduce your overall fitness, making it difficult to think clearly and stay alert throughout the day.
If you need help finding time to exercise, don’t make going to the gym an absolute must. Make it a habit to do push-ups or burpees every day, throughout the day. These exercises will get your heart pumping and your blood moving, and they only require two hours of your already busy schedule.
You can add gym or fitness classes to this basic habit, but this essential investment in exercise will keep you on your toes when you can’t get to the gym.
Try this: do at least 10 burpees every day from home.
Habit #3: Twenty-minute naps
Napping may seem lazy, but research shows it has many cognitive benefits. This is especially true if you’re a heavy learner, as short periods of sleep can help your memory.
I used to feel guilty about napping, thinking it was a sign of weakness. Now it’s a strength. A short break can get you back to work in the afternoon when you are usually exhausted. Even if you work in an office that doesn’t encourage naps, you can quickly use part of your lunch break to rest.
The key is to learn to take short naps. Many people take naps for too long, pushing them into deeper sleep phases and making them even more sleepy when they wake up (although the benefits of these naps often come after the initial sleepiness wears off). The key is to wake up immediately with the alarm. A quick nap can turn into a long sleep if you add time.
Try this: take a 20-minute nap after lunch to refuel for the afternoon.
Habit #4: Do your work in the morning.
Try to get your most important tasks done in the first four hours of the workday, starting as early as possible.
The benefits of your energy here are primarily psychological. My energy levels depend a lot on my mood. If I’ve done the essential work, my philosophy is generally good, and I feel productive. If I’ve wasted time with emails, meetings, and calls or failed to produce anything of value, I often feel frustrated and exhausted as I head into the second half of the day.
The other reason for this approach is that it’s only sometimes possible to work in depth throughout the day. Concentrating on a specific period is better than inserting it randomly in chunks.
Try this: make the first four hours of the morning a zone of quiet, deep work.
Habit five: Set your intention the night before.
Energy is often a matter of drive. If you start working hard, you’ll overcome procrastination and make it through the day. Start slowly, and you may need help with your impulses and waste energy on things that could be more productive.
One way to avoid this is to set a clear goal for how the day will go the night before, especially at the beginning. If you visualize this intention and write it down in your planner, it will automatically happen when you wake up.
Try this: Before going to bed, write your plan for the next day and visualize it.
Habit #6: Convince yourself of your goals.
Many people have two conflicting beliefs simultaneously: that others (marketers) are good at convincing them to do all sorts of things they wouldn’t otherwise do, but that they can’t change their motivation to do what they need to do.
It will help if you become the salesperson for your own goals, not for others, but for yourself.
It starts with the packaging – how you phrase your goals and plans can significantly influence your motivation. Is it something you have to do? Or an exciting challenge?
Next, you need to remember your inspirations and refresh them. Why did you choose this path? What did you hope to achieve? Good marketers know they need to let the customer focus on imagining what they want to sell. You can focus on what you want to spend energy on to get there.
Try this: Take ten minutes daily to think about where you are headed with your actions today.
Habit #7: Look for better friends
You may need help choosing your parents, co-workers or boss. But you have some control over the friends in your life.
You know some friends with whom you leave a conversation feeling good and energized. Others, however, leave you feeling even more damaged than before.
You don’t have to exclude friends temporarily from going through difficult times. Nevertheless, it would be helpful for you to think about who you spend your time with when people regularly create one-sided emotional outbursts as the basis of your relationships. Sometimes everyone needs a shoulder to cry on, but some expect you to be their shoulder constantly.
Try doing this: Set a time limit for friends you feel drained with.
Habit #8: Read better books
One of the great benefits of reading books is not just that they give you ideas and information. Instead, it reinforces a mindset that often plays out in the subconscious. The best books are not the ones that give you facts but the ones that subtly change your overall thought patterns.
Audiobooks can be beneficial because you can listen to them and repeat them daily. A good book that lends itself to this automatically directs your thinking to the things you need to work hard on when you listen to it. Just as a good song can serve as a backdrop for a particular emotion, a good book can serve as a backdrop for a specific thought energy.
Try to do this: Always pick up an audiobook that motivates you to work on your goals.
Habit #9: Align your life
The last habit is not a one-time process but a constant effort to bring the different elements of your life out of conflict and into alignment.
A lot of energy is wasted because of the different parts of our lives, inner and outer, conflict. It could be the co-worker who doesn’t want you to get a promotion, friends who don’t care about your goals or even inner fears and assumptions that make you hesitate.
Please take time to untangle the various conflicts in your life and see how you can resolve them. Sometimes this can be done in the short term by making a change. Sometimes a long-term plan is needed to escape the toxic environment, social context or belief system holding you back.
