Design Your Surroundings To Make Good Choices
Setting Yourself Up For Success.
Now this alone can mean a million things for a million (7 billion) people and there are tons of books and writings on this subject I am sure of it. Something like Discover your Values and Set your Trajectory or maybe it's a Develop your Strategy and Stay Focused, and yes these are absolutely great advice, tips and tricks, but what I'm talking about here today is something even more simple than it sounds.
Like plan and lay out what you're going to wear the next day in advance during the previous evening or loading up the coffee machine just to make a non morning persons morning a tad bit easier.
This is the set up I'm talking about.
1. One of the most effective ways to set yourself up for success is to create a routine that you do every day; be it upon waking up or when you go to bed.
For instance by choosing to do activities that make you feel centered and balanced, you can move into your day from a place of inner harmony. This can take as little as five minutes or as long as an hour. Routines are a great way to tell your body what is about to happen.
2. This one can be a hard one but I do recommend it purely based on how it make me feel. Do the most challenging or important task of the day first. Once you get the most stressful thing out of the way, you can go about the rest of your day feeling a little more relaxed. Doing so will also help you gain momentum early on.
3. Stick to a schedule. As much as possible, set boundaries around how much time you spend working and - more importantly - not working every day. Be sure to build in time to exercise, meditate, cook, connect with loved ones, get fresh air, or do whatever else is important to you. Doing so will make you more efficient and productive during the time you do spend at work.
4. Drop the idea of multitasking, there's no such thing as successful multitasking. Focus on one task at a time, and do it with your whole focus. You will feel much more productive and empowered as a result.
5. Set up your environment for success. This is our leading character of our list, if nothing else do this!
Making changes to your environment makes it easier to do what’s right without having to think about staying motivated. If you set up your surroundings so that making the best decisions comes easily, then you can set yourself up to practice better habits.
What simple tasks are you putting off because something is located in a difficult place; maybe the floss you should be using is in the lower drawer and you never see it, therefore you never use it.
Maybe the shirt you'd love to wear needs ironing but you realize this in the morning when you should be out the door already.
What about drinking water, maybe you need a straw or fancy glass to prompt you to stay hydrated.
Or that one where you have goodies in the cupboard "just in case someone comes over" but you're trying to eat clean?
How about the size of your plates? If the plates you use to eat dinner with are large, do you tend to fill them up with more food than you need?
If you have choices around you that are distracting or lead to undesirable outcomes, then it becomes hard to make the right choices.
Often, we think that change comes from within. We believe that achieving a goal is about changing ourselves and what we think, which in many cases it is. But we discount the fact that optimizing our environment to make better choices can make a large impact on our actions.
The changes we make may seem small initially. For instance, it might not seem like much to move a book you want to read from the shelf to your desk. But when you make incremental improvements to your environment, it becomes much easier to do what’s right.
Whatever little thing you need to do to make sure you succeed do that. Only you know what that looks like for you. Set yourself up for success in your daily routines and make sure your environment is allowing you to get things done sufficiently.
If you have any suggestions or tips to make someone's daily tasks a little easier, please share them in the comments or on Instagram, spread the knowledge.
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