How Optimize Your Daily Life

 
It’s astounding what you can accomplish when you shift your perspective. Improving your personal productivity, organization, and time management skills is best done by taking a counter-intuitive approach.

I have many nerdy hobbies. Among them, I enjoy experimenting with ways to improve self-efficiency, and then sharing my discoveries about what actually works. In fact, this site evolved from an idea I had several years ago of providing uplifting solutions for very busy people. Though everybody has a slightly different definition of success, the fact is that for most of us winning at life is determined by our ability to set and achieve our goals and realize our dreams.

Streamlining: The Formula for Winning

The reason that optimizing your life requires a counter-intuitive approach, is that it involves working backwards: in order to win at life, you must win the year, but first you must win the month, but before that you must win your week, and to do that you must first win the day!

Most people like the idea of living a more streamlined lifestyle — the mere thought of it sounds soothing. And, indeed, our real lives are comprised from our smallest daily habits and choices.

A former business coach of mine often encouraged me to “win the day!” And a day is won by making a series of good choices that you follow-through upon.

“…the day isn’t over till it’s over”

You Can Make Mistakes and Still Win The Day

Your day is not won by being perfect, for none of us is. Winning is not perfection.

Let’s say you mess up by eating a plate of peanut butter cookies for breakfast. Well, the day isn’t over yet. You can still take this thing.

Let’s say you screw up by watching reruns of Green Acres on Hulu during lunch, instead of going to the gym. Well, the day isn’t over yet. You can still take this thing.

The day isn’t over till it’s over. And you might not know until the following morning, whether the day before was — overall — a productive one or not.

By eating fresh vegetables with lunch and dinner, say, or going for a power-walk in your neighborhood before bedtime, the day can still be won, even if you’ve slipped up a couple of times.

 
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3 Tips for Optimizing Your Life

Think of productivity as your success-rate for achieving goals, both large and small. If you’re intrigued by the idea of improving your productivity and optimizing your own life, here are 3 tips that will likely be of great help:

Tip #1: Have a System to Fall Back On

You don’t have to use a productivity system every single moment or even every single day. But it’s pretty important to have a system to fall back on when you get off-track. Everybody gets off-track sometimes. Just about everyone over the age of 30 uses a calendar app on their smartphone to track appointments, which is good, but a calendar hardly comprises a complete productivity system. You need something that’s going to help you to organize your thoughts and get things done.

Tip #2: Each Day Plant Seeds for a Future Harvest

One of the mistakes people make most often in their day, is getting so caught up in a current project, that they forget to allocate a little time toward cultivating new acquaintances and, especially, deepening existing relationships. It seems that almost everyone is tempted to make this mistake: company executives, entrepreneurs, fitness trainers, real estate agents, homemakers — you name it.

In business, cultivating relationships is the ultimate “future-business activity,” because if you spend all of your time working with an existing client, without spending at least a little time generating future clients, it’s hard to reach that tipping-point where your business will grow exponentially.

But this just isn’t about the work part of your life, it’s about your entire life. The natural law of attraction that operates in the universe, reveals to us that prosperity is often magnetized by enthusiasm and connectedness. In modern daily life, it’s very easy to forget these basic principles of common sense.

Even if you spent all morning and afternoon reacting to problems from a currently consuming project, you can still allocate an hour or so from this day to reach out to your tribe of friends, acquaintances, relatives, and past clients to connect.

Tip #3: Be Playful in Your Approach

While it might seem that this is the most frivolous of the tips, it’s actually the most important. To optimize your life, you must have a light-hearted sense of play and humor, otherwise the whole endeavor gets very oppressive and — ultimately — it just won’t work. I’ve seen this time and time again, people who attempt to “should” or shame themselves into being more organized. It truly helps to think of the whole thing as a mischievous game. If you don’t believe me, try approaching your life-optimization with this more positive attitude, and you’ll experience for yourself what a difference it can make.