Productivity is a requirement for success and success is a requirement for productivity.  It might be obvious why you need to be productive to be successful.  In today’s busy life you are constantly getting bombarded with new info.  Most of the info is a waste of time.  However there are little gems in between that will create lots of opportunity for you.  For example, if you read 20 different posts about how to make money online, you’ll usually find that there is only one post that’s really good and that you can apply.

Being productive is a skill that one builds.  As you become more productive you become better at judging info.  You can quickly see whether a piece of information is useless (and therefore you can ignore it) or is useful (and therefore you can concentrate on it).  Productivity is also important when it comes to your thinking.  Often most of our thoughts are useless and most of our worries are a wast of time since they never come true.

Becoming mroe aware of your thoughts, your worries will help you get red of the useless ones.  It will free up your mental energy so that you can focus and concentrate on the important things in life.

By now you are probably wondering how success is a requirement for productivity.  Well if you are successful you are often rewarded for it, most commonly through money.  You can then use this money to outsource mundane tasks and therefore increase your productivity.

It’s the reason why most wealthy business men have an assistant to take care of mundane tasks for them.  However you can start being more productive without being successful.  If success is your goal then you should start trying to be more productive and efficient starting today.

Managing a home based business is not that easy. Though it has got its own advantages there are several problems that come with it. You might have a lot of distraction from your environment or even from your family. It’s really a difficult task to manage your schedule while you are running your business from home.

For ensuring good productivity in your home based business you should learn to separate your home life and business work and manage accordingly. I have tried to provide some tips that might help you in your home based business:

• You should schedule your time such that your important business works find the right amount of time rather than some petty works.
• Set goals each and every day. By the end of the day ask yourself whether you have finished them all. If not, find out the reason for your lag. This type of daily goal setting gives you lot of confidence in your line of business. This also helps in proper usage of your precious time.
• You might have children at home. But don’t get distracted by them or other members of your family. Don’t take the advantage of working from home. Let them understand you are still working. Allocate separate timings for your leisure activities. Most of the home businesses have gone unproductive because of their family distractions.
• Invest some extra time into your business. During the initial stages of your business, make sure you are working for a longer time period than usual. This might help in giving a firm base to your business. In turn you will experience the productivity for sure.
• Keep away from distractions like TV or fm radios. They are the prime enemy for your business work. You can turn them on when you are free, but not during your business hours. Set your table in a place devoid of these kinds of distractions.
• Have you heard of many saying all work and no play makes one dull. That means a lot. Have fun when you are done with your job or during your break hours. You will become really fresh after having some fun. Start your work fresh.
• You might try working offline to avoid distractions through internet. Deal with your mail accounts offline. If you are online, limit yourself for essential usage and nothing more.
• Multitasking is a must for a good business man. You can try to concentrate on other works if you are waiting for a content to be printed or in between your phone calls. Ultimately you can get more work done in less time.
• Consider yourself as your boss or head. Speak to your conscience about the daily goals. Reward yourself for a job well done.

Sometimes you may find it too difficult to carry the business single handed. During those circumstances don’t hesitate to get assistance from your family or friends.

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.