There isn’t a secret trick to being successful, but there are habits that rich and successful people have in common. Understanding the underlying principles of these habits and breaking them down may helpful. Many of us become can easily become more successful than we expect with just a few tips like this.
Making Your Bed
For some reason, most successful people seem to share the habit of making their bed ever morning. What’s the reasoning behind this goofy passion?
It’s actually very simple reasoning. Successful people aren’t afraid of work. They aren’t afraid of cleaning their room. Leaving dishes in the sink until later on or putting off vaccuming are unsuccessful habits.
Putting things off only means that you usually have to do more later. If you put off three or four simple tasks, they’ll pile up into one big project later on. Dealing with problems or unexpected hickups as they happen is a very good habit at preventing bigger problems in the future.
Just man up and do your bed as soon as you wake up. It’ll leave you feeling in control and productive.
Organizing Your Wallet
Most successful people tend to arrange the money in their wallet. Same side, smaller bills in front, etc. This makes paying easier, cleaner and safer. People who crumble and smash their money into their wallets tend to waste more time.
If the bills in your wallet are unorganized, it’ll waste more time at checkout. While the time isn’t much, that struggle shouldn’t even exist. Crumbled bills and credit cards stuffed into cash compartments leave you at risk of dropping money.
Think about this for a second. If you pull out a few singles that are tangled with a twenty dollar bill, you may pry it out along with your bills and lose it. If your money isn’t organized, you’re probably going to be rushing, trying to find the right bills in your wallet as it is, so a fallen bill might fly right past you.
Successful people tend to be organized and maintain their organization with little, often over looked things like arranging their money in their wallets.
Sticking to a Schedule
The most important part of consistency is a schedule. The reason why people are so successful and consistent with work and school is because they’re on a strict schedule.
There’s a penalty for not being faithful to the schedule as well. If you’re late to school, you run the risk of failing the course and if you’re late to work, you run the risk of getting paid less or even fired.
Successful people tend to use calendars and other organization planners to schedule their days. A lot of successful people even dedicate time slots to certain activities. Just like work and school, they have a certain time of the day and week for exercise, a consistent bed time and even a consistent morning routine.
A schedule is probably the first and most important habit. A lot of people might consider a schedule to an OCD-like habit, but that’s only if the idea is misinterpreted or misrepresented.
A schedule isn’t meant to control every hour of the day, but allocate days and time blocks of the day for certain activities.
A schedule doesn’t look like this:
9am-10am workout
10:30am-11am lunch
12pm-1pm doctors appointment
etc
etc
Schedules like that don’t work and are ineffective because none of those activities can have a time that specific. There’s a lot that can go wrong with a schedule that tight.
Instead, effective schedules look something like this:
Bed time 10:30pm
wake up 6am
-Breakfast
-shower
Gym
Post office
Meeting at 2:30pm
-food shopping
Writing/reading 9:30pm
Schedules like this don’t try to manipulate time so closely, but organize tasks instead. The trick is to plan the day with the most important or time sensitive tasks in mind and not restrict them to time frames.
A schedule like that will be consistent over time because eventually, a time pattern will be present, but should never controlled. If you allow yourself thirty minutes of reading time before bed, that’s great, but don’t try to do that with something that has too many variables, like working out.
Schedules also keep your life in order and prevent unwanted “surprises”.
Disciplining Distractions
The most successful people often have some sort of self-disciplining tactics they use in their lives to limit distractions. There are a lot of distractions these days that can interrupt your day and even throw off your schedule. If these distractions aren’t addressed, they can spiral out of control.
Many successful people have tools on their computers or laptops that block websites like Facebook or Twitter. Some have timers that only allow a certain time period on those sites. Some people also get out of the house and go to a coffee shop or a library to get work done. When I’m in Starbucks working, I put my phone on airplane mode to avoid being distracted by alerts.
You may be thinking that this doesn’t apply to you and that you have the will power to avoid being distracted. I use to say the same, but then I quickly came to the conclusion that there’s all reward and no risk to putting an anti-distraction system in place. There’s no point in relying on will power when I can just automate the process. Out of sight, out of mind. No one is going to award me a prize for struggling.
Updated Tool Set
Most successful people stay up to date with technology and functional advancements. They keep up with new apps and tools they can use to better maintain their money or schedule.
A lot of people are frustrated when new technology or a new update is released because they feel like they have to commit a lot of time to learning it and they are fine with what they have now. Highly successful people don’t get mixed up like that. Successful people, who have schedules and time management systems see updates as a worthy investment to clear MORE time for them in the long run or make a current task a lot easier.
Successful people are award of the short term commitment to learning new software updates or adapting to a new piece of technology. They also know that this small, short term investment will yield long term benefits.
A lot of people avoid the short term struggle, but suffer with the long term side effects. I see businesses that struggle like this all the time. Some businesses don’t keep up with the great tools out there. There are a ton of automated scheduling programs and marketing tools that can be integrated into their websites. Some businesses are so neglectful in keeping up with updates that they don’t even have websites.
Updating your tool set is a must. It’s modern day darwinism. Those who adapt, thrive and survive, those who don’t, slowly wither away.
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