Remember that you’re the commander-in-chief of your life. You must decide which habits you’ll keep and which you’ll abandon. Conduct personal experiments to discover which habits produce the best results for you. Which habits increase your effectiveness? Which ones get in your way?
Here’s a list of 66 habits that can help boost your personal effectiveness. Scan these items to see if any of them appeal to you.
01. Daily goals. Set targets for each day in advance. Decide what you’ll do; then do it. Without a clear focus, it’s too easy to succumb to distractions.
02. Worst first. To defeat procrastination, learn to tackle your most unpleasant task first thing in the morning instead of delaying it until later. This small victory will set the tone for a very productive day.
03. Peak times. Identify your peak cycles of productivity, and schedule your most important tasks for those times. Work on minor tasks during your nonpeak times.
04. No-comm zones. Allocate uninterruptible blocks of time for solo work where you must concentrate. Schedule light, interruptible tasks for your open-communication periods and more challenging projects for your communication-blackout periods.
05. Mini-milestones. When you begin a task, identify the target you must reach before you can stop working. For example, when writing a book, you could decide not to get up until you’ve written at least 1,000 words. Hit your target no matter what.
06. Timeboxing. Give yourself a fixed time period—30 minutes works well—to make a dent in a task. Don’t worry about how far you get. Just put in the time.
07. Batching. Batch similar tasks such as phone calls or errands together, and knock them out in a single session.
08. Early bird. Get up early in the morning, perhaps at 5 A.M., and go straight to work on your most important task. You can often get more done before 8 A.M. than most people do in a full day.
09. Pyramid. Spend 15 to 30 minutes doing easy tasks to warm up. Then tackle your most difficult project for several hours. Finally, end with another 15 to 30 minutes of easy tasks to transition out of work mode.
10. Tempo. Deliberately pick up the pace and try to move a little faster than usual. Walk faster. Read faster. Type faster. … Go home sooner.
11. Neat freak. Reduce stress by cultivating a relaxing, clutter-free home and office.
12. Agendas. Provide clear written agendas to meeting participants in advance. This greatly improves meeting focus and efficiency. Use agendas for important phone calls, too.
13. Pareto. The Pareto principle is the 80-20 rule, which states that 80 percent of the value of a task comes from 20 percent of the effort. Focus your energy on that critical 20 percent, and don’t overengineer the noncritical 80 percent.
14. Ready-fire-aim. Bust procrastination by taking action immediately after setting a goal, even if the action isn’t perfectly planned. You can always adjust your course along the way.
15. Minuteman. Once you have the information you need to make a decision, start a timer and give yourself just 60 seconds to make the actual decision. Take a whole minute to vacillate and second-guess yourself all you want, but come out the other end with a clear choice. Once your decision is made, take some kind of action to set it in motion.
16. Deadline. Set a deadline for task completion, and use it as a focal point to stay on track.
17. Promise. Tell others of your commitments so that they’ll hold you accountable.
18. Punctuality. Always arrive early for appointments. Punctuality enhances authority.
19. Gap reading. Read books and articles while waiting for an appointment or standing in line.
20. Resonance. Visualize your goal as already accomplished. Put yourself into a state of actually being there. Make it real in your mind and you’ll soon see it in your reality.
21. Prizes. Give yourself frequent rewards for achievement. See a movie, schedule a professional message, or spend a day at an amusement park.
22. Priority. Separate the truly important tasks from the merely urgent. Allocate blocks of time to work on critical tasks, those which are important but rarely urgent, such as physical exercise, writing a book, and finding a relationship partner.
23. Continuum. At the end of your workday, identify the first task you’ll address tomorrow and set out the materials in advance. The next morning, begin working on that task immediately.
24. Slice and dice. Break complex projects into smaller, well-defined tasks. Then focus on completing just one of those tasks.
25. Single-handling. Once you begin a task, stick with it until it’s 100 percent complete. Don’t switch tasks in the middle. When distractions come up, write them down to be dealt with later.
26. Randomization. Pick a totally random piece of a larger project, and complete it. Pay one random bill. Make one phone call. Then select another random piece and repeat.
27. Insanely bad. Defeat perfectionism by completing your task in an intentionally terrible fashion, knowing you never need to share the results with anyone. Write a blog post about the taste of salt, design a hideously dysfunctional Website, or create a business plan that guarantees a first-year bankruptcy. Which a truly horrendous first draft, there’s nowhere to go but up.
28. Delegation. Convince someone else to do a task for you. Offer a fair trade or reasonable payment.
29. Cross-pollination. Learn new skills that are unrelated to your work. Train in martial arts, study a foreign language, or learn to play chess. You’ll often encounter ideas in one field that can boost your performance in another.
30. Intuition. Go with your gut instinct. It’s probably right.
31. Optimization. Identify the processes you use most often, and write them down step-by-step. Rework them on paper for greater efficiency, then implement and test your improved processes. Sometimes we can’t see what’s right in front of us until we examine it under a microscope.
32. Super slow. Commit yourself to working on a particularly hideous project for just one session a week, 15 minutes total. Declutter one small shelf. Purge ten clothing items you don’t need. Write a few paragraphs. Then stop and wait another week.
33. Dailies. Schedule a specific time each day for working on a particular task or habit. One hour a day could leave you with a healthier body, a finished book, or an income-generating Website a year later.
34. Add-ons. Build a new habit by tacking a task onto one of your existing habits. Water the plants after you eat lunch. Send thank-you notes after you check e-mail.
35. Plug-ins. Inject one task into the middle of another. Read while eating lunch. Return phone calls while commuting. Listen to audio programs while grocery shopping.
36. Gratitude. When someone does you a good turn, send a thank-you card. That’s a real card, not an e-card. This is rare and memorable, and the people you thank will be eager to bring you more opportunities.
37. Training. Train up your skill in various productivity habits. Increase your tying speed to at least 60 words per minute. Learn to speed-read. Improve your communication skills.
38. Denial. Just say no to noncritical requests for your time. If people get upset with you, let them.
39. Recapturing. Reclaim other people’s wasted time for yourself. Visualize your goals during dull speeches. Write out your grocery list during pointless meetings.
40. Mastermind. Explain your most challenging problems to several other people, and invite all the advice, feedback, and constructive criticism you can handle.
41. Twenty. On a piece of paper, write down 20 creative ideas for improving your effectiveness.
42. Challenger. Deliberately make the task harder since challenging tasks are more engaging and motivating than boring ones. Perform physical chores such as filing or cleaning with your nondominant hand. Compose poetic e-mails to clear your inbox.
43. Asylum. Complete an otherwise tedious task in an unusual or crazy manner to keep it fun and interesting. Make routine phone calls using fake foreign accents. Take notes in crayon.
44. Music. Experiment to discover how music may boost your effectiveness. Try trance or rock music for e-mail, classical or New Age music for projects, and total silence for high-concentration creative work.
45. Miracle worker. Estimate how long a task will take to complete. Then start a timer, and push yourself to complete it in half that time.
46. Paying it forward. When an undesirable task is delegated to you, re-delegate it to someone else.
47. Bouncer. When a seemingly pointless task is delegated to you, bounce it back to the person who assigned it to you, and challenge them to justify its operational necessity.
48. Opt out. Quit clubs, projects, and subscriptions that consume more of your time than they’re worth.
49. Decaffeinating. Say no to caffeine, suffer through the withdrawal period, and let your natural creative self reemerge.
50. Conscious procrastination. Delay noncritical tasks as long as you possibly can. Many of them will die and won’t need to be done at all.
51. TV-free. Turn off the TV, especially the news, and recapture many usable hours.
52. Timer. Time and log all your tasks for an entire day, preferably for an entire week. The simple act of monitoring your time usage can boost your effectiveness tremendously.
53. Valor. Identify the item on your task list that scares you the most. Muster all the courage you can and tackle it immediately.
54. Nonconformist. Run errands at unpopular times to avoid crowds. Shop just before stores close or shortly after they open. Take advantage of 24-hour outlets.
55. Agoraphobia. Shop online whenever possible. Get the best selection, consult reviews, and purchase items within minutes.
56. Reminder. Add birthday and holiday reminders to your calendar a month or two ahead of their actual dates. Buy gifts then instead of at the last minute.
57. Do it now! Recite this phrase over and over until you’re so sick of it that you cave in and get to work.
58. Coach. Hire a personal coach to stay motivated, focused, and accountable.
59. Inspiration. Read books and articles, listen to audio programs, and attend seminars to absorb fresh ideas and inspiration.
60. Gym rat. Exercise daily. Boost your metabolism, concentration, and mental clarify in 30 minutes a day.
61. Troll hunt. Banish the negative “trolls” from your life; and associate with positive, happy people instead. Mindsets are contagious. Be loyal to truth, love, and power, not to your pity posse.
62. Evil eye. Practice your best evil eye in a mirror, and use it liberally on anyone who enters your space to interrupt your most important tasks.
63. Politician. Throw money at your problems until they eventually succumb. How many of your problems can be solved more easily if you define them in financial terms? Can you justify the cost of hiring an assistant, a babysitter, or a cleaning service?
64. Modeling. Find people who are already getting the results you want; interview them; and adopt their attitudes, beliefs, and behavior.
65. Proactivity. Even if others disagree with you, take action anyway, and deal with the consequences later. It’s easier to request forgiveness than permission.
66. Real life. Give online activities (such as gaming, reading blogs, or posting on forums and message boards) a rest, and reinvest that time into your real life, which, if you’re a gamer, is probably suffocating beneath a pile of dead, smelly ores.
All habits are not equal, so take the time to form important ones that can make a real difference in your life and those of others. For example, the habit of journaling helps me (Steve Pavlina) solve problems and gain new insights, and the habit of blogging allows me to share what I’ve learned with other people. In both cases I’m typing on my computer, but blogging is the more impactful habit. Often the simplest way to make a habit more significant and meaningful is to find a way to share it with others.
* Source: Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina