Last Updated on March 3, 2023
One of the main challenges of running your own business is learning how to remain motivated and how to keep some discipline and actually get up in the morning… Don’t get me wrong, having your own business, or simply working for yourself is great, especially if you’re making good profits, but at the same time, you have to face some challenges you’d never even imagine can become tough.
Finding some work discipline is one of these challenges. You see, when you’re working in a 9-to-5 job this is quite easy. Your boss tells you what to do and when to do it, and if you don’t, you’re in trouble. But when you’re your own boss you tend to turn a blind eye and not pay that much attention to your day-to-day effects.
At first, this doesn’t seem like something that can be bad for your business, but after a while you start to realize that you have very hard time getting any kind of tasks done, and this is the first step towards making your business tank.
So here’s my simple advice on how to be more productive by working early, a short step-by-step guide.
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1. Go to sleep early
The fact is that you simply won’t be able to get up early if you’ve just gone to sleep. The idea is not to sleep briefly, but to get a full 7-8 hour sleep. So if you’re going to get up early, you have to go to sleep early as well. Pick your own hours. The situation is different for different people. But once you pick a going-to-sleep hour, stick with it.
2. Get up early
No further explanation needed. Simply have some dedication and force yourself to get out of the bed as soon as you hear the alarm. Don’t press the snooze button 10 times in a row…
3. Start your day by doing physical exercise
This is actually the best way to wake up. Even better than coffee. Do a set of push-ups, sit-downs, and pull-ups. If you train some martial art, you can throw a couple of punches or kicks too. This shouldn’t take you longer than 10 minutes.
4. Shower
Just to give you this final kick you need in the morning.
5. Breakfast
Make it protein-rich to have the energy for the rest of the day.
6. Set a fixed number of work hours
Time to start working, but before you do this, set a number of hours you want to work this day. Pick the tasks you want to do and then estimate how much time they can take. Then be careful for the rest of the day not to work less than the set number of hours.
7. Start with simple warm-up tasks
Since your body is already warmed-up now it’s time to warm up your brain as well. In your work, there are always some tasks you can do that don’t require that heavy processing on your part, things you can do even when being half asleep. Start with these tasks and treat them as your warm-up. For instance, writing a personal journal works great for me.
8. Do the critical tasks
Every day has some critical tasks that need to be done no matter what. From my experience, having more than one or two critical tasks for a day is too much. Treat your critical task as something that absolutely has to be done on a given day. Therefore, taking care of it just after your warm-up is probably the best time.
9. Do other tasks
Now it’s time to get all the other stuff out of the way. Since you already have your critical task done the remaining tasks shouldn’t be that difficult or that stressful. Make sure to have frequent breaks. Your brain is not capable of remaining productive for more than 2 hours at a time, so keep that in mind.
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That’s it for my advice, but feel free to let me know about your own tricks. What keeps you productive? We would love to hear your thoughts, so don’t be shy and comment below! Please don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed or follow Inspirationfeed on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook! If you enjoyed the following article we humbly ask you to comment, and help us spread the word!
