Improving on Time, Character, Mentality, Emotions, and Health

There are 5 things that if we can improve on everyday would result in two valuable aspects of our life. One of the results would be being more productive during the day. The other one would be having more inner peace within ourselves. The 5 things that improve productivity and inner peace are time, character, mentality, emotions, and health.

Most people either have one or the other in terms of productivity and inner peace. But imagine working at your job everyday having absolute clarity, being emotion-free, and getting more results done in less time. It will take some small changes, but small changes 1 day at a time can have monumental changes for a lifetime. I’ve outlined some of my ideas below.

Time

Managing time is always something that can be improved on. For example, what time of did you wake up today? Whatever the answer is, realize you can knock off 1 hour and 45 minutes to it by just waking up 15 minutes earlier per day. Let’s just say you usually wake up at 8:00 AM, but you started waking up 15 minutes earlier every day beginning from this Monday. So Monday – 7:45, Tuesday – 7:30, Wednesday – 7:15, Thursday – 7:00, Friday – 6:45, Saturday – 6:30, Sunday – 6:15. By next Monday, you would wake up at 6:15 AM, which is almost 2 hours extra just to begin your day with.

Another time management skill that could be improved on is tasks that can be done faster. For example, maybe you’re a freelancer and you get paid $10 per researched and written article. Let’s say you do an article in 1 hour and 30 minutes, so in 6 hours, you make $40. Try to see if you can reduce the time only by 15 minutes until you get to 45 minutes per article. So it would look like 1 article in 1 hour 30 minutes, 1 article in 1 hour 15 minutes, 1 article in 1 hour, and 1 article in 45 minutes. It takes 3 tries to do this, but the results are doubled. Instead of writing 4 articles in 6 hours, it would be possible to do 8 articles in 6 hours, if you can do 1 article in 45 minutes. The pay would then be $80 instead of $40 – double the amount of money in the same amount of time.

Character

Let’s go into character. Character has to do with being a good leader, whether this is being a leader of a group or being the leader of themselves. For example, go about life treating others with respect, the kind of respect you would like to have from other people. You may disagree with other people, but there’s no point in dealing with it in an angry way or telling other people that they are wrong in order to be right. Instead, learn to be open minded and settle differences by understanding another person’s point of view. This helps build character by being understanding and responsible for making the best out of the worst.

Another thing that helps build character is doing one thing to help a person out a day. It can complimenting somebody on the internet or doing something to help someone in real life. You’ll see that helping people has a contagious effect to it. For example, a few days ago, I was driving to Walmart. I came to a stop after I was exiting off a freeway. A few cars a head of me, I noticed a bum standing on the corner stoplight asking for money. Someone from the car rolled his window down and gave the bum some cash. It was green light and he drove off. When I started driving, I didn’t think the bum was expecting anything, but i rolled down the window and handed him $3. “Thank you sir, God Bless You” was the answer I got. The car which drove off will never know that I did this act, but his action had an effect on me. The funny part was when I got to Walmart, the cost of my supplies cost $42, and I had $41 in cash in my wallet. I had to use debit carb; and even thought it was irritating, when I think back on it, helping a homeless guy survive for 1 hour with $3 is more important than being irritated for 5 seconds.

Mentality

What can you do to improve your mentality. This is what goes on inside your brain such as your thoughts and your thinking process. A big portion of having a good mentality is having mental clarity. Hundreds of things go on our minds everyday, but if you can select one the things that matter the most and focus on them, you will be able to make life a lot simpler. Thinking doesn’t have to be complex or complicate unless you want it to be. Try to improve on thinking effectively, but simply, and you will get productive results.

Another advice on improving mentality is reading. Make it a habit to read everyday. It can be from a newspaper, it can be from a blog, or it can be from a book. As long as you’re reading something that’s going to help you out in some way, shape, or form, you will be investing in yourself through expanding knowledge. This lets you see things from another person’s perspective as well as makes you more worldly, letting you become more creative and giving you ideas for the future.

Emotions

Part of the biggest problems humans deal with is their emotions. I’ve written many articles on dealing with emotions on this blog, but if you haven’t read some of them, one thing that I would recommend you to do is spending some time everyday to sit down and go through a period of self-therapy. This will save you hundreds of dollars from seeing a real therapist.

For example, sometimes I worry a lot about the future. There’s always some type of “thing” that I’m afraid to do because I feel like I might  regret it later on. Facing it though is probably one of the best ways to overcome this negative emotion. This requires me to sit down somewhere quiet and ask “What’s the worst that can happen if I perform this action?” When the answer comes up, I will visualize it in my head. When you go through something enough times in your mind, eventually that negative emotion will won’t have that big of an impact on you. Then when the real thing happens, you won’t feel as much pain because you will have already gone through it many times. This makes us less emotionally invested in little things that bother us everyday.

Health

Finally, there is health. There are many ways to improve health but the main one I want to target here is exercise. Exercise helps combat chronic diseases by making sure you are getting enough blood circulation and oxygen throughout the body, it helps manage your weight by losing calories, it helps bring your mood up, it gives you more energy (haven’t you ever felt a burst of energy from doing high level physical activity – I know I have from playing basketball), it clears your mind, and finally, it gives you better sleep.

You don’t have to spend a lot of time everyday, if you woke up earlier like from the first example of waking up 1 hour and 45 minutes earlier, you would be able to get your jogging done, take a shower, and be ready for the day with energy and clarity. Also, you can always find small ways to do more exercise. I used to make the effort to purposely find the parking spot nearest to the shop that I would go to. Now it doesn’t bother me as much. I kind of purposely park farther now so i can walk to the store. It’s good on the legs.

In conclusion, try to improve on these 5 factors a day: time, character, mentality, emotions, and health. You will feel better, live life happier, and get things done. If you ever get stuck, you can always ask the question, “What can I improve upon tomorrow from what I learned today?” You will usually find an answer to that. Write it down and work on it. Improving something small each and every day adds up to a huge difference down the road, even if it’s just 1 new thing a day.

photo credit: Vince Alongi