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.