Feeling a bit drowsy lately?  Maybe you have been feeling sluggish and tired throughout the day.  Maybe you have been feeling sleepy during the afternoons at work.  Maybe you just want to feel more energetic through the day.  Well here are some Instant Energy Tips.

1. Take a Power Nap. Take a 5-10 minute power nap.  Sit back in your seat, close your eyes, and just let yourself fall asleep for 5-10 minutes.  You can do this on trains, buses, and even in cars as long as you aren’t driving.  You can also do it during your lunch break at work.The key is that you fall asleep sitting up on a chair.  If you fall asleep on a bed, you will be tempted to stay in bed, and it will feel like a huge hassle getting out.  However since chairs aren’t very comfortable you usually wont fall asleep for long, and will naturally wake up in a few minutes feeling refreshed and energized.  You can also try biphasic sleep if you would like to be more energetic throughout the day.
2. Eat Smaller More Frequent Meals.Eat a small meal every 2-3 hours.  This helps keep your energy levels more even throughout the day.  I’m sure you have the experience where you eat a huge lunch, and afterwords notice a huge decrease in your productivity.  You probably felt sleepy and just wanted to go back to bed.  Maybe you even were at work, and started dozing off staring at your computer screen, and kept making sure your coworkers didn’t notice
3. Modify Boring Activities.Often I noticed that certain activities tend to leave me feeling lazy, a bit tired, and even sleepy.  Usually those activities are the boring ones, things that “I Have” to do rather than want to do.  The solution I came up with was making those activities more exciting.If I was bored at work, then I’d take a break from working and read an interesting article, check out a cool online video, take a walk around the office and talk to co-workers, send a crazy text message or two to some friends etc.  Whatever boring activity you have to do you can usually modify to be more exciting.  The more exciting an activity is the more energetic your body will feel when you do it.
4. Use the Power of Full Focus.Often your body isn’t giving you the level of energy you need because you aren’t demanding it.  To demand more energy and more productivity out of your body use the power of full focus.  Whatever activity you are working on, give it 100% of your focus, skills, and cognitive ability.Often people fall asleep when reading because they aren’t reading fast enough.  Did you know that the faster your read the more engaged your mind is?  Your mind will increase your comprehension speed to adapt to your increased reading speed.Be fully present and focused on whatever you are doing.  Often we are either thinking about past situation or future events in our lives all the time.  This is very inefficient since we can’t control the past or the future.  This also drains our cognitive abilities, focus and our energy.
5. Eliminate, Eliminate, and Eliminate Some More.Often we are out of energy because we are trying to do too much with our time.  Instead of focusing on the few more rewarding activities in our day, we are very passive and let ineffective useless tasks waste our time.  Use the power elimination and increase your productivity.  This will help you make more time, and have more energy for the really important tasks in your day.

Have any other instant energy tips?  Share them with everyone in the comments or even better write a guest post for this blog .  To get future instant energy tips subscribe to this blog.

This is a follow up to my Morning Ritual - Start Your Day Productive.  This post will conclude my morning ritual trial.  In this post I will summarize my findings about implementing a morning ritual, the good, the bad and the ugly

I have already discussed many of the benefits of implementing a morning ritual in my day 2 post.  So it certainly is a good habit that I’d recommend anyone try implementing.  The bad news is that it takes a lot of trial and error, and discipline to implement.

Just like implementing any other healthy habits, there will be days where you totally blow it and wont feel like doing your morning ritual.  I skipped my morning ritual on day 3.  What stinks is that on day 4 it was even harder for me to get back on track.

All in all this was a great experiment.  If you have anything to share about morning rituals please leave a comment

This is a follow up to my Morning Ritual - Start Your Day Productive.  While getting up in the morning and jumping into my morning ritual right away can be a bit challenging, I’m really enjoying the experience.

I find that when I first wake up, I have the tendency to get distracted.  Whether I want to check my email, reply to some text messages on my phone or read the news.  These are many of the way I used to start my day in the past.

However once I push myself to get going on my morning ritual, and especially start the physical activity portion of it, the rest takes care of itself.

I’m also finding that it’s a bit easier with some preparation the night before.  If you are planning on taking a walk in the morning, it will help tremendously if you prepare the night before.  Lay out your walking clothing and shoes.  Maybe find your water bottle, and your music player.  This way when you first wake up, everything you need to start your morning ritual is right there and you have no excuse to skip out on it or be distracted.

Some Benefits of the Morning Ritual:

• Getting your physical activity or exercise out of the way first thing in the morning.  This is probably the biggest benefit.  It sets you up for a healthy active day, leaves you feeling energized and ready to take on whatever comes your way.
• Starting the day in a Positive Mindset.  Doing your physical activity and eating a healthy breakfast as part of your morning ritual gets you in a positive mindset.  If later on in the day negativity or laziness tries to sneak in, you will most probably ignore it.  That positive and healthy momentum that you build in the morning tends to stay with you all day.

Some Morning Ritual Issues to Watch our for:

• Perfectionism.  This will certainly make implementing a morning ritual very difficult.  Things will come up.  Maybe you are planning on doing a morning walk, you wake up and it’s raining heavily outside.  If you are a bit of a perfectionist and get angry about this, you will probably just give up on your morning ritual.  Instead be flexible, do your best, try an alternate psychical activity at home, or even skip the physical activity portion of your morning ritual for that day.  Alternate physical activities could include cleaning your house, doing sit-ups, doing push-ups and so on.
• Waking Up Earlier.  You might have to wake up a little earlier than usual to do your morning ritual.  Waking up earlier can be tough.  An easy way to do it is to wake up earlier slowly and gradually.  Maybe wake up 15 minutes earlier everyday this week.  And then next week wake up 30 minutes earlier, and so on.

Your Morning Ritual is simply what you do every morning when you first wake up.  For most of us this is rushing out of bed, and trying to get to work on time.

I’ve read in my many personal development sources about the importance of a morning ritual.  This is a ritual that you come up with to start your day off.  Most sources claim that a morning ritual boosts up your productivity tremendously throughout the day.

While you are free to include anything you want in your morning ritual, some common elements are:

• Physical activity, some kind of exercise like walking, yoga or even going to the gym
• A healthy breakfast (many health guru’s claim that this motivates you to eat healthy the rest of the day)
• A shower or other grooming, cleanliness activities

I decided to give the morning ritual a serious try, and wanted to keep everyone updated on my progress.  I will be trying it for 5 days and posting everyday about my results.  Today was day 1, and here is my morning ritual:

• Drink 0.5 Liter of Water (might add protein powder) - Many claim that this leaves your skin and body feeling healthy after the dehydration that happens during sleep.
• Physical Activity for 30 Minutes.  This could be a walk, a run, or some weight lifting.
• Shower
• Eat a Healthy Breakfast
• Review my Goals & Visualizations & Plan Goals for the Day

In my experiment I will be checking if this really does increase my productivity, and if it’s worth the effort.

Since today was day 1, I did notice the following:

• I woke up feeling a bit lazy, however after the physical activity portion of my morning ritual I was feeling great and ready to tack another day
• I did get a lot more work done than usual
• My head has been a bit clearer, and I have been feeling a bit more energetic

To stay up to date on my morning ritual progress, and findings make sure to subscribe to my rss feed.

Also if you are interested in trying the morning ritual yourself for 5 days and reporting your results, please leave a comment below stating your interest.  I will contact you at the email address you use when submitting the comment.

Productivity tips are everywhere.  Anywhere from productivity videos to productivity blogs to productivity books.  Everyone wants to be more productive yet I rarely ever hear this big productivity tip mentioned.

Why does everyone want to be more productive?  Lack of time, everyone wants more free time.  Well what uses up our free time in the first place?

Mostly useless, ineffective, boring, mundane, necessary tasks.  This is why the biggest productivity tip is Elimination.  And here is a list of things you can start eliminating from your life right away that will free up your time so you can do more productive things…

1. Eliminate Watching TV.  It numbs out your emotions.  Say what?  When you watch too much tv, you start living your life through the characters in the shows and movies you are watching.  You feel their emotions, you live through their actions, and you achieve their goals.  In other words, you forget about your life, things you need to take care of and the goals that you need to accomplish.  Start gradually watching less TV and watch your productivity increase.
2. Eliminate Worry.  Worry is useless.  Often we worry about things we can’t control in the first place.  We worry about possible future events.  We worry about what others think of us.  We worry about what others are saying about us.  Stop worrying, start doing, and watch your productivity increase.
3. Eliminate Perfectionism. We often want to be perfect.  We want to look perfect.  We want to dress perfect.  We want to talk perfectly.  And the list goes on.  There is nothing wrong with self improvement.  This is a self improvement site.  However there is always good enough and then there is perfect.  Good enough is often sufficient.  Trying to be perfect is usually a waste of time.  Here is an example.  If you are thinking of buying a car, you could spend months researching everything about cars, their features, their ratings, their safety etc.  You can then test drive different makes and models and finally buy the perfect car.  What did you do?  You wasted lots of your valuable time.  Instead, why don’t you just buy a car that’s good enough?  Decide the 3 most important factors in buying your future car, and research only those three factors.  Save time, and do more productive things.
4. Eliminate Indecision.  We often want to make the best decisions.  I even remember this stupid little video we saw in school that went on for 2 hours about how decisions basically make up your future blah blah blah… While decision are important we often wast too much time making them.  Being decisive is a trait of very successful people.  Make decisions quickly and adjust them based on the results.  This will help you create more free time to do the really productive things in life.
5. Eliminate Blame.  Want to get no where in life?  Play the blame game all the time.  We all do it to some degree.  It’s when we blame our current life situation on other people, on circumstances, on nature, or basically on anything else we can’t control.  As a result we focus on things we can’t control, rather on our own actions, thoughts, and decisions which we can direct.  Blame less, and take responsibility more.  This will free up a lot of your wasted time and energy which you can put towards more productive things in your life.

Got any more elimination productivity tips?  Share in the comments or write your own guest post.