Photo by Indy Kethdy via Flickr (CC)

I discovered this life hack last year when I was trying to get myself to wake up earlier so I could go to the gym first thing in the morning. I had been getting up around 5:30 a.m. or 6 a.m., but that wasn’t early enough for me to fit my workout in. I needed to get to the gym by 5 a.m. in order to get back home by 6 a.m., so I could eat, shower, help get our daughters ready to go and then take my 6-year-old to school.

I had tried the gradual approach, setting my alarm a bit earlier each morning, slowly backing up my wake-up time. The problem? It didn’t work very well. I am not a morning person, and my willpower is not that strong when I first wake up.

That’s when I stumbled across this new approach to rising early. I was astounded by how quickly and effectively it worked. This is, as I recall, based on research done at Harvard about how the human body clock works. Though, for some reason, I can’t seem to find the link to this through Google.

Anyway, here’s how it works.

1. Figure out what time you want to get up. Let’s say, for this example, that you want to get up at 6 a.m.
2. The day before eat your last meal 12 to 16 hours before you want to get up. So, if you want to get up at 6 a.m. you should eat your last meal sometime between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. the afternoon before. I recommend a large, late lunch, and then skipping dinner. Don’t eat anything (other than maybe water and noncaffeinated herbal tea) after that meal.
3. Go to bed 7 to 9 hours before you plan to get up (i.e. 9 p.m. to 11 p.m.). You still want to get enough sleep so you feel good the next day.
4. Set your alarm for the new time you want to get up. The next morning you should find yourself waking up at that time fairly naturally.

Provided you maintain the habit of getting up at the new time, you should be able to stick to this new wake-up time but go back to your normal eating schedule.

Some cautions:

• I have used this to back up my wake-up time one to two hours. I don’t know how effective it is if you’re moving it back several hours. If you try it, let me know.
• When you wake up at that new time – get up! This is not the time to test yourself by dozing a little.
• Avoid caffeine and alcohol 6 to 8 hours before your bed time. You want to get good quality, uninterrupted sleep in order to wake feeling rested.
• To lock in this habit after the first time you do it, you should make sure you get enough sleep. Otherwise, over time you will revert to your later wake-up time. For most people, that probably means 7 to 8 hours of sleep each night.
• Getting something in your stomach fairly soon after waking up should help your body lock in this new wake-up time.

So, if you want to wake-up early – tomorrow – give this a try and let me know how it works for you.

Photo by darque9 via CC

So, did you make any resolutions for 2010? Have you set any new goals?

Many people do, and most people fail. In fact, according to one survey a couple years ago, a third of all resolutions don’t last beyond January.

So, in the spirit of helping those resolutions make it out of January alive, here’s a round-up of links related to goal setting and New Year’s resolutions.

Five tips to make it more likely you’ll achieve your goals

The Guardian reports a university study that found those that were most likely to be successful with new resolutions had five key strategies: breaking their goals into smaller pieces, rewarding themselves when they achieved one of these sub-goals, focused on the benefits of success, kept a journal about their progress and told their friends about the goals. New year’s resolutions doomed to failure, say psychologists.

You must ‘fight like hell’ to make these changes

Dave Navarro, in his typical ass-kicking fashion, advises that you approach your new year’s resolutions with your eyes wide open. Changing your behavior isn’t easy and will require consistent work and effort, so prepare for that. What No One Will Tell You About the New Year.

Six tips for discovering your true passion

Think you should be setting goals, or resolutions, or something – but not sure what yours should be? Pick the Brain has six tips on how to discover your true passion, including:

• Start with your talents.
• Be open to new experiences.
• Communicate with people in your field.

As suggested in the Guardian story above, focusing on the positive gives you a much greater chance of achieving your goals, so finding your true passions is likely to make it much easier for you to set goals that you will really achieve. 6 Tips to Discovering What Lights Your Fire

Five steps to setting clear goals

As should be obvious by now, one of the keys to being successful is to set goals that are clear and specific. So how do you do that? White Dove Books has a simple five-step process to help you create goals that are very specific. How to Set Clear Goals

Some ideas for getting unstuck

If you’re feeling stuck – you just don’t know what to do or where to start, despite a feeling that you should be doing something – read this post from Chirs Guillebeau’s fabulous The Art of Non-comformity. He has a few simple tips designed to help you get out of that place of being stuck and into a more productive place. Feeling Stuck? Try This

Resolutions for being happier, month by month

If you want some ideas for resolutions that will just make you happier, check out Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project. She has a simple month-by-month plan for making small changes in your life to make you happier. You can sign a pledge to try these (which will make you more likely to actually follow through) and then subscribe to Gretchen’s blog for free. She’ll be making short videos each month that provide advice on that month’s very reasonable happiness resolution. Make 2010 a Happier Year. Decide Now

Gretchen has a new book out, The Happiness Project, based on the work she’s been documenting on her blog. I haven’t read it, yet, but if it’s half as good as the blog it should be a fantastic book.

A definitive guide to sticking to your new year’s resolutions

Leo Babuta of Zen Habits has a seven-step method for succeeding in your resolutions. In fact, he’s gone beyond that and created a new site based on this method, called Six Changes. He suggests that you could create as many as six new habits this year by adopting his method. That’s actually more ambitious than I would suggest – I like three to five major goals at a time, max. But I like his method and I think there’s a lot of truth in it. The Definitive Guide to Sticking to Your New Year’s Resolutions

Four writers’ tips on achieving goals

Web Worker Daily has collected advice from several authors – Gretchen Rubin, Josh Leibner, Joseph Don Goewey and Sam Glenn – about how to make changes stick. It’s all good advice. I find Joseph Don Goeway’s thoughts about particular strategies working better for men or women especially interesting. New Authors Look at New Year’s Resolutions

David Allen’s approach to setting goals for the new year

Time management guru David Allen lays out a way to review your 2009 – what you did, how the year went and so forth – and come up with new goal for 2010. He includes a list of several key areas of your life (physical, emotional, financial, etc.) that you might want to consider. Scroll down to “David’s Coaching Tips” to see his advice. Productive Living – David’s Coaching Tips

10 steps to achieving your new year’s resolutions

CNN lays out 10 tips to help you stay motivated and actually achieve your new year’s resolutions:

1. Set smaller goals with smaller steps.
2. Frame your goals positively.
3. Look at the pros and cons.
4. Get a resolution buddy.
5. Be specific.
6. Know thyself.
7. Examine deeper issues.
8. Don’t be overanxious.
9. Be flexible.
10. Keep your eye on the ball.

Go to the story to read more details on each of these. 10 Ways to Get Motivated for Change in 2010

Photo by Justin Shearer at Flickr via CC

This is the third of a three-part series on productivity best practices. Here’s where you can find Part 2 – Eat that Frog and Part 1 – Daily Planning.

Here is one of the great mysteries of productivity. If you have something on your to-do list that you’re not that enthusiastic about, it can sit there for day after day, week after week, and never get done. On the other hand, if there’s something on your calendar that you’re not that enthusiastic about – whether its a dental appointment or your annual review with the boss – there’s a pretty good chance you will carry it out. One of the main differences is that by putting something on your calendar you’ve psychologically committed to doing it at that time. The calendar, it seems, is more powerful than the to-do list.

Time boxing is a productivity technique that can help you take advantage of this psychological quirk to boost the amount of stuff you get done. Here’s how I recommend using time-boxing on a daily basis to get more done.

1. Time box your daily frog item. Remember the technique of eating the frog[link] I talked about in the second post in this series? In the first available ‘box’ of time you have on your daily schedule, schedule this task. Set aside an hour or 30 minutes or whatever it will take to get this done.

2. Schedule your must-do list. After you’ve gotten something that you’ve been procrastinating on your calendar, review the rest of will-do tasks (from part 1 of this series, daily planning). Roughly in order of priority, schedule those must-do tasks on your calendar. Warning: I don’t recommend trying to schedule all of your time in the day, unless you have one of those rare jobs without unplanned interruptions.

3. Work your calendar. If your schedule is like mine, you’ll have other meetings and appointments on your calendar that you have to work around. In addition, you may find yourself being interrupted by phone calls, urgent emails or other items. I urge you to focus on sticking as closely to your calendar as possible. Some of those interruptions are avoidable, others are not. If your boss wants to talk to you now, showing him this blog post is probably not going to buy you a reprieve. Nonetheless, between the interruptions you can’t avoid, work the calendar.

If you consistently use time-boxing to set aside a portion of your daily schedule to focus on key tasks, you’ll find yourself becoming much more productive.

Have other productivity-boosting techniques that you use each day? Share them in the comments.

Here is a round-up of some of the best recent self-improvement links from around the web.

Ten tips for an emergency energy boost

Gretchen Rubin at The Happiness Project offers 10 ways to get an extra energy boost. We all have times when our energy is running low but we still have work that needs to be done. Rubin suggests things like taking a short, brisk walk and jumping up and down a few times to get an extra boost of energy when you need.

Do you make these 7 common mistakes when changing a habit?

With New Year’s coming up, many of us will be making resolutions for 2010, and many of those resolutions will focus on changing habits. Some will resolve to stop negative habits, such as smoking or spending more money than you make, and others will try to establish new positive habits, like exercising. If changing habits is on your list for 2010, this post is worth a close read as a part of your planning. Two that really stood out for me were trying to change too many habits at once and not keeping up the effort for long enough.

How to do something even when you don’t feel like doing it

This is another excellent post from Henrik Edberg at the Positivity Blog. The ugly truth is that no matter how enthusiastic, energetic and positive I’d like to be, there are definitely things that, sometimes, I just don’t feel like doing. But I need to. Henrik offers a three-step method for moving beyond being stuck about something you don’t want to do, and just getting it done.

Overcoming Procrastination – 7 Tips to Get Yourself Going

Procrastination is the single biggest obstacle to consistent productivity and accomplishment. Mark Foo, writing at Pick the Brain, offers seven tips for moving through procrastination and getting started. I especially like No. 5 – “Do it now.” When I establish a do it now attitude my productivity skyrockets and procrastination melts away.

Let me know what you think of these posts with a comment below. Thanks!

This is the second of three-part series on productivity best practices.

image by Hamed Saber via Flickr

Another of the major enemies of productivity is procrastination. It may be, in fact, the biggest single obstacle to productivity. There are a lot of reasons for procrastination, and a lot of potential solutions, but that’s for another post (or series of posts, more likely). But there is one anti-procrastination technique that I try to practice every day: Eating the frog.

It was Brian Tracy who first coined this term, as the title of his great book on time management, “Eat That Frog.” The concept is simple. Each day, pick something that you’ve been delaying doing, something that your procrastinating on, something that you don’t want to do, but you know you need to do. Then do it, and do it first.

Getting that one task that you’re dreading done and out of the way will make everything else you do during the day seem easier. Your stress level will decrease, your productivity will increase, and you’ll soon find that most of the things you dread doing aren’t really that bad after all.

I try to pick one frog task to put on my Will Do list each day, and I mark it to ensure that’s the one I do first. Try this, and you’ll be amazed by how much your stress and anxiety will go down and your productivity will go up.

Have you tried this technique? If so, please share your experience with it in the comments below.

This is the first of a three-part series on productivity best practices.

One of the main enemies of productivity is disorganization – losing important information or documents, not knowing what you need to do next, forgetting deadlines and commitments. There’s little doubt – some people are better organized than others. Some of us are great at writing everything down, filing papers carefully and keeping a meticulous calendar. Some of us are, well, not so great at those things. But with the number of emails, text messages and and other interruptions we all receive, all of us are at risk for missing something important. One solution to help keep you on track is daily planning.

I find I am most productive when I take time each morning to plan out my day a little bit. Typically, that planning process includes the following:

1. Review my calendar.

What meetings, commitments, etc. do I already have scheduled for today? Are there any important deadlines or significant events going on that would effect what I need to do? This is an important step, because a day packed with meetings means I am probably just not going to get as many other things done.

2. Review my master to-do list.

I keep a master to-do list that has every task, every project and every goal on it. At any given time it has well over 100 items on it. It’s a long list, that runs on the back and front of two to three pages of paper. But it also represents, in one place, all of my commitments, obligations and open loops. I frequently add things to my list during this stage (oh yeah, yesterday my boss asked me to …), and I also cross off items that I’ve completed.

3. Write my daily to-do list.

Like many people, I’ve found the key to productivity is to focus primarily on a getting a small number of things, typically three to five, done each day. Usually I accomplish much more, as things come up that need to be dealt with immediately, but by having three to five key tasks that I can focus on, I know what I need to concentrate on. Unlike my master to-do list, which is long and at times a bit overwhelming, the the daily list is short and do-able. Leo a of Zen Habits calls this daily list his Most Important Tasks. Others call it a Will Do list, or even just a Today list.

Do you have daily rituals or practices that help make you more productive? Please share those or other thoughts in the comments section below.

Steven Aitchison has a great post about how to become more productive on his Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life blog:

“Work as if you are being audited, and have to explain every single minute of your day.”

This is a great tip. First, it brings to mind a classic time management technique – logging your time every few minutes throughout the day. The point of logging your time is to see where you’re wasting time, what’s distracting you and so forth.

Beyond that, what I like about it is that it focuses on the idea of simply doing stuff. Many time management systems focus on organizing your goals, projects and tasks. And while that’s important, the most important part of being production is simply taking action. That’s also the hardest part. Thinking of your time as being audited, imagining yourself as having to explain what you did with every single minute, increases the your motivation to take action now.

Read more about this at Steven’s post: The Most Powerful Productivity Technique Ever.