Here’s a few strategies for preventing this from happening.

1) Wake up earlier than you need to

If you travel any distance to work, it’s important to wake up earlier than you need to. A stressful drive to the office, or missing your bus by a few seconds can really ruin your day. Leave plenty of time for getting ready and eating. As a rule of thumb, if you don’t have time to eat a proper breakfast before working, you’re not leaving enough time.

2) Review your goals and task lists

The more in control of your life you feel, the happier you are. Keeping a close eye on your goals and tasks keeps everything fresh in your mind, and you’re much less likely to forget about them. Not only that, but it allows you to review things and to quickly spot troubles. And it puts you in a positive frame of mind.

3) Read your affirmations

Before I tried using affirmations, I thought they were a waste of time. However, having experimented with them I’ve found them to be an invaluable tool for improving my mood. Stick to two or three simple ones, such as “I have abundant energy” or “I make effective use of my time”.

Think of affirmations as a kind of mental scaffolding. They’re useful for keeping you internally positive and uplifted until you can change your external situation.

4) Read something uplifting

Rent autobiographies of people you admire from the library. When you come across a good article on the Internet, print it off and read it later. Not only will this help reduce the amount of time surfing the net, but it creates your own personal library that you can refer to time and again.

Keep a highlighter handy when you’re reading them, so you can mark any important points. Review these later and make your own set notes.

5) Listen to something uplifting

If reading isn’t your thing, rent some audiobooks or listen to podcasts. There’s a wealth of personal development podcasts out there, and the advantage is that you can do something else whilst listening to them. Such as exercise…

6) Do some exercise

Twenty to thirty minutes of simple exercises in the morning gets your blood flowing and improves your mood. It doesn’t have to be too strenuous, and some light skipping or a gently jog around your area is just as effective.

Remember what you’ve achieved

So you’ve been up for just over and hour, and you’ve already managed to review your goals, read your affirmations and done some exercise. Sounds much better than stuffing down a slice of toast and running for the train…

Free Templates

There are three new templates in total. They’re very simple, but they were designed that way so it wouldn’t matter if I spilt tea on them or made a mistake. The first template is a blog scheduler, the second is a to-do list and the third is a daily planner.

Blog Schedule

This is the template I use on all of my blogs to try and keep some form of order in the chaos. It’s setup to use four steps for creating each post, which I outlined in “How a blog article is born“. BlogSchedule.doc (109KB) BlogSchedule.odt (12KB) BlogSchedule.pdf (40KB)

To-Do List

I usually have a dozen or so projects going off at any time, so I created this little to-do list to be used with any project. It’s meant to be as generic as possible, so it can be used for just about anything. ToDo-List.doc (56KB) ToDo-List.odt (11KB) ToDo-List.pdf (27KB)

Daily Planner

This little template breaks the day into half-hour chunks that can be used to schedule your day. See “How to create an effective schedule” for a complete guide on creating a schedule that works. DailyPlanner.xls (25KB) DailyPlanner.ods (10KB) DailyPlanner.pdf (14KB)

These templates are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 Licence, which means you’re welcome to share and modify them as long as you keep the original link and don’t use them for commercial purposes.

There’s nothing quite as de-motivating as feeling you’ve wasted a day doing nothing. It’s easy to get frustrated, and even if you have had a productive day, the habit of beating yourself up can still keep your mood down and hold you back. Unless you keep track of what you’re doing with your time, your account at the end of the day will mainly be based upon how you feel at the time. The solution to this problem is the trusty time log.

What is a time log?

A time-log is a simple tool that lets you keep track how you’re spending your time. This is very helpful when trying to optimise your time, and it also helps to make sure you don’t concentrate on the negative aspects of your day. After a few days and weeks of using a time log, you can then build up an accurate picture of how productive you’re being, as well as when your most productive hours are. For example, you might find you’re much more productive during the first few hours of the day, or directly after you’ve exercised. Using this information you can optimise your daily performance by scheduling tasks for your most productive hours.

How do you keep a time log?

I use a very simple 3-column format for my time logs. The left column is used to note the start time, the large column contains the activity and the small column on the right is used at the end of the day to calculate the length of the session. Although the example picture is from a spreadsheet, I prefer to use a purely paper driven system for ease of use and portability.

Your own personal circumstances will determine when you start keeping track of your time. If you’re self-employed, you might want to start it as soon as you wake yup. If you’re in an office environment, it might be more beneficial to start as soon as you leave your front door. If there’s a particular part of your daily routine that you feel is causing trouble, make sure you capture it on your log for later analysis.

Once you’ve started, every single activity needs to be noted down. This includes tea and coffee breaks, toilet stops and the ubiquitous "just 10 seconds to check my email" task. Most of these are trivial activities, but it’s quite enlightening to see just how long they take when added up. To give an example, the very first time I used this technique I found I was wasting over three hours on "checking email/web surfing".

At the end of the monitored time period, work out how much time was spent on each task by using the recorded information. After a week or two of using this technique, you’ll have a good idea of areas where you need to improve. It’s also not unusual to see a direct improvement within the first few days as a result of tracking your time. Often knowing that your time is being monitored is enough to keep you on-track for a little bit longer and can help you push through to a task’s completion.

Isn’t this all a little excessive?

Keeping a time log is a very small price to pay compared to the improvements that can be gained. If you’re wasting a lot of time during the day, it’s not uncommon to double your productivity within a week or two. And remember, you can stop keeping a record once you’ve made the improvements you wanted. If ever you feel your productivity has slipped, you can start recording again.

What is it?

The “mind dump” is a way of getting a lot of information out of your head and into your organisational system. It’s a simple process that doesn’t take particularly long, although it may take longer if you haven’t done it for a while. It’s a great way of clearing your mind, and it allows you to get a good view of your projects, commitments and tasks.

When do you use it?

A good time to perform a mind dump is at the end of every week, just before your weekly review. Another good time to use it is when you’re feeling overwhelmed with work, or when your brain is swimming with ideas and you can’t concentrate.

How do you do it?

Make sure you have at least twenty minutes of uninterrupted time, sit down and relax. Take a sheet of paper and write down a task you want to do. This can be something simple like making a phone call, to something larger like setting up a blog or starting a business. Absolutely anything goes, so write as much as you can. I generally write down at least a hundred items if I haven’t done it for a while, but you may find you only write down fifty. The important thing is to get as much out of your head as possible.

You can either write every item on a separate sheet of paper, or write them all on to the same sheet. I prefer to write it all on one long list, but you may find separate sheets are easier to process.

How do you process the list?

This all depends on your organisational system, but a rough GTD method is as follows:

Go through each item on the list. If it’s something that will require more than one task to complete, it’s a project so it gets added to a “projects” list. If it’s a single action that will take less than two minutes to complete, do it immediately. If not, add it to the appropriate “to-do” list.

If it’s something you want to do, but don’t know when (such as taking a holiday), write it on your “Someday/maybe” list. As soon as you process each item, cross it off the list or dispose of the sheet it was written on.

What are the benefits?

The main benefit of this technique is that it gives you a clear mind and helps you concentrate. Once you’ve processed the list, you know everything you were thinking of will be taken care of, and your mind can rest at ease.