One of our often stated goals is to make progress on our goals every day.  That leads us to look for ways to create daily habits that promote progress and productivity.  In this episode, we look at three productivity habits you should adopt for a proper mindset before getting into the craziness that many days become.  These are easy to do and highly recommended among modern productivity gurus.

List Your Goals For The Day

The simplest thing you can do to start your day is to make a plan.  Likewise, the simplest plan you can make is a list of tasks.  This habit can end your day or start it, but in either case, the goals are to set priorities and reasonable goals each day.  Think of this as your roadmap for the day.  When things get hectic, or your mind wanders, you can return to this list to regain focus.  As a bonus, this also provides a way to claim small victories each day.  That may seem trivial.  However, we all have days where we are ecstatic to have any good news in our life.

Use The Value of Steady Improvement to Achieve Big Goals

Review Your Schedule

Planning is a great way to start your day.  That includes looking over your prior commitments.  Give your calendar a once-over at least and make sure you have a high-level view of where you need to be and when.  An appointment you forget about or that you scramble to fit in (because you forgot about it) can be a substantial negative impact on your productivity.  Of course, it also can cause you to annoy or lose the respect of others. 

Our lives tend to be very busy, and that makes it easy to overlook or forget an appointment.  Therefore, a habit of starting each day with a review of your schedule is needed and will reduce the risk of that embarrassing situation.

Quiet/Reflection Time

Taking time out is one of the better productivity habits you can create.  We see this in many situations.  A little time to “take a deep breath” is a key step in thinking outside of the box or other epiphanies.  When we start our day in some style of reflection, it helps us positively set our attitude.  The return on investing a little quiet time is rather amazing.  However, do not take my word for it.  Try it out for a week or two, and see how effective it is for you.

Mindfulness Tools

Rob Broadhead

Rob is a founder of, and frequent contributor to, Develpreneur. This includes the Building Better Developers podcast. He is also a lifetime learner as a developer, designer, and manager of software solutions. Rob is the founder of RB Consulting and has managed to author a book about his family experiences and a few about becoming a better developer. In his free time, he stays busy raising five children (although they have grown into adults). When he has a chance to breathe, he is on the ice playing hockey to relax or working on his ballroom dance skills.

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