March 5, 2019

4 Ways to make every day, A Super Productive Day!

Mukul Agarwal

Founding Partner at Circle Wealth Advisors P. Ltd.

4 Ways to make every day, A Super Productive Day!

We all have the challenge every day to be productive, to be able to do the things that we want to do and be happy. Yet, this always seems to be a distant dream. There are so many things coming up every day, that most of the tasks remain unaccomplished at the end of the day, giving us a not so good feeling.

So how can we have a super-powered productive day, and that too every day? I have personally been challenged at this for a very long time. To give you a perspective, I live in Mumbai city which is known for the traffic snarls, the distance between my home and office is 25 km, and the clients are spread all across the city. On a normal day, I spent close to 4 hours on the road, just traveling. That’s a super waste of the limited time that we all have at our hand. Even starting from home at 7.30am and reaching back late evening by 9 pm did not make me produce effective results and always kept me disillusioned about my daily activity. And then I had no energy left for playing with kids and spending time with my wife and parents. Does this sound familiar to you as well?

Recently, someone helped me understand the below activities that have increased my productivity immensely.

Energy

The first and foremost requirement to be highly productive is to have physical energy. Without energy in our body, we can do nothing – neither positive thinking nor any other work. Imagine how one feels when we are infected with a viral fever – since we are drained out of energy, we are mentally frustrated and also have no physical power to do any work as well. Energy comes from 3 sources – having enough sleep, eating nutritious food, and daily exercise.

Numerous studies have proven that a normal human being needs 7-8 hours of sleep every day. We know from childhood that ‘Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise’. Likewise, we don’t eat on time and also taste has replaced the nutrition in our diet. Till the time body does not get adequate carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals, and proteins, we will feel exhausted or have pain in some part of the body or other. An ideal food break up for the day is to drink 4 liters of water in a day, have fruits in the breakfast so that it cleans up the digestive system, a proper full-fledged meal for lunch and light dinner. And a daily exercise routine is a must to revitalize all the parts of the body. A 30 minute morning walk can do wonders and keep us energized throughout the day.

Things I love to do

All of us like to do certain activities but are unable to do them due to some compulsions or the other. List down all such activities that we like to do & schedule them in the calendar, whether personal or official ones. Balance time left would be for all other things that we NEED to do. If there are things that still remain to be allocated, delegate or outsource them to capable people. This way, we will be able to concentrate and focus on things that need to be done and at the same time enjoy the things that we love to do. This will also give inner happiness and fulfillment.

90 minutes Rule

Robin Sharma says that we must spend our first 90 minutes of work time to do the most important task for the day. List down all the tasks that we need to complete during the day, arrange them in terms of the priority and start working on the most important one. Only when that task is over, move on to the next one. This way, we will remain motivated for the entire day and accomplish most of them.

Review yourself

Every evening on way back home, review the entire day the way it went. Identify the good things that happened and thank God for them. Also introspect the not so good things and think about what we could have done to get better results. Remembering the good things will make us feel happy and finding solutions for the not so good things will give the confidence to deal with such events the next day.

So above are the rituals I have started since last month and am having phenomenal results. I hope you all also benefit from these small nuggets and make your every day a super effective day!

This article was published in NetworkFP ThinkTank Magazine 2018 Edition.