8 Ways to Energize Your Afternoons

Posted 9 months, 3 weeks ago at 11:30 am. 0 comments

When afternoon lulls hit, they hit hard. And when you’re trying to be productive and have a great day, nothing brings down your energy like the feeling you’re being hit by a semi-truck.

Afternoons are a bit different than mornings for several reasons. First, the boost of energy you feel in the mornings is generally gone by 2pm, and you’re left will willpower, motivation, and self-discipline to get you through the rest of the day. Second, you’re likely to be burnt out from a mass of projects that you’ve been chipping at since 9AM. Lastly, you’re frazzled from having to deal with distractions all day.

I know where you’re coming from. I feel your pain - afternoon blues plague me too. Fortunately, I have some tips you can use to re-energize your afternoons, so you can accomplish everything you want to on a given day.

1. Make a plan of what you want to accomplish. With a crystal clear plan of what you want to get done, you automatically become more motivated. Working without a plan in the afternoon is like trying to drive through fog - you can only see so far in front of you. Fuzzy, unclear goals are no good; they’re entirely de-motivating. Decide exactly what you want to do, write it down, and get to work.
2. Deliberately schedule some downtime. One of the major problems people have with afternoon scheduling is that they try to cram in every little task they can think of because they want to stay “productive”. Unfortunately, productivity suffers when you start running out of steam. Take breaks liberally if you can. The more energized you are, the more creative and focused your thinking and actions will become.
3. Don’t skip out on the caffeine. It’s odd to say this, but if you’re one of those people who is a major coffee drinker, and you bypass your afternoon cup of coffee, your late afternoon and evening will be a nightmare. Drink the cup(s) of coffee to bypass caffeine headaches and to give you a quick burst of energy.
4. Do some light exercising. No, no, you don’t have to go running for 30 minutes around your neighborhood. Just do some light exercises that are energizing. Take a quick 5~10 minute walk around your block, or lift a couple of 1lb weights for several reps. Even dancing in your chair for a few minutes will boost your heart rate and make you feel a bit more alert and energetic!
5. Listen to uplifting, upbeat music. This is the perfect reason to put in your Madonna CD! When you hear music with a good beat that makes you happy, those feelings immediately rub off on you. How many times have you been in the car when your favorite song comes on, and you can’t help but smile and belt it out for the world to hear? That is what your afternoon music should do to you! Put in some tunes that make you feel great, and watch your enthusiasm level soar.
6. Review your goals and aspirations. Knowing why you’re working on (what you think are) asinine, boring projects is a class of motivation in itself. Taking a look at your current goals and lifelong aspirations can make you realize why you want to have a productive afternoon - which in turn will make you feel more motivated and inspired to take action on even the dullest of projects.
7. Talk to the people you care about most. Call up a friend or significant other when your afternoons start to go to waste. You’re a person - and people are extremely social creatures who want to talk to other like-minded persons like themselves. Just hearing another person’s encouraging words can be enough motivation for you to finish that project you’ve been procrastinating for months on.
8. … don’t do anything productive at all! Yeah, I know… Bad advice, right? I don’t think so! Everybody has those days where nothing goes right. You spill hot coffee on yourself, you accidentally throw away an important paper, you snap at your boss, something sad happens in your life, and you got the wrong order at McDonalds when you went to get lunch. If this sounds like the story of your afternoon, just think about taking the rest of the day off, if possible, and relax as much as you can. You can always start your projects where you left off tomorrow morning.

3 Tips to Change Your Environment

Posted 9 months, 4 weeks ago at 11:00 am. 1 comment

In the last post, we went over how your environment shapes and molds who you are. First, it reinforces your social class; second, it reinforces your job; third, it reinforces what and and how you think about yourself. That’s a lot of control it has over you! The great thing is that you are in total, full control over the environments you interact with. You may not be able to take heed of how all those places look, feel, and the impressions they give to you, but you can decide where you want to spend your time at. And more importantly, you can decide to change your personal environments to be more congruent with a productive, successful person - the kind of person you aspire to be.

Here are some tips on how to change your environment, in case you need a few ideas to get you started.

1. Change the places you frequent the most.

Different places produce different feelings. For an extreme example, you get a vastly different feeling witnessing a head on collision than you do looking out at the Atlantic Ocean on a moonlit, starry night. Why? Because the environment is different - different scenery, scents, “feelings”, people, everything.

Think for a moment about the places that you like to go to the most. Certain restaurants, people’s homes, perhaps church or a study group? If you take the time to to think about what attracts you to those places, you’ll wind up finding out that those places reinforce your belief about who you are and where your values lie. Like always attracts like in real life, regardless of what you’ve been taught! People of the same social class, job status, and values normally always congregate in the same places.

Of course, this has two sides to it. On one hand, if you’re going to places where the people are proactive, successful, and have high values placed on honesty and integrity, those are almost always going to be values you are personally going to own. Not so much a problem in those places, right? But if you spend most of your time at people’s houses who like to get drunk, have no life goals, and are pretty apathetic about what happens in the world, those ideals are probably going to be a part of you. Whoops! Not a good thing.

What kind of feelings would you get when you try to work on a major project in a public library? What kind of feelings would you get if you tried to work on that same project in Starbucks? What kind of feelings would you get if you tried to work on that same project on the beach, overlooking the ocean? Would you be more productive, less productive, more inclined to do a great job, less inclined?

2. Dress for success!

You’ve heard it time and time again - dress for the job you want to have, not the job you currently have. Why? Because it’s totally true!

When you put on clothes go do springtime yard work in - old jeans, oversized sweater, dirty sneakers - how do you feel about yourself when you look into the mirror? Your reaction probably falls along the lines of “Oh my goodness! Who is that person staring back at me?!” Now imagine yourself getting dressed up for a wedding and looking into the mirror. (I know some of you probably loathe dressing formally, but keeping following me here!) How do you feel now?

You can have a vastly different attitude on life depending on what clothes you’re throwing on your back. Going grocery shopping in pajama pants and a potato sack of a sweater will make you feel differently than if you dressed up and went to the store in a casually nice, professional look. Why? Because we attribute meaning to clothes - certain clothes automatically give us certain impressions because it’s what we expect them to do to us. Pajama pants are for bedtime, so when we put them on we automatically give ourselves a “lazy” mindset. But dressing up to where you look stunning every day, we give ourselves a “polished, successful” mindset.

You probably don’t have a huge budget for clothes. I highly recommend buying higher quality, but fewer pieces that look amazing on you, and slowly building up your wardrobe so you dress the part of a successful, smart person who knows what he or she is after. You’ll immediately see a difference when you look into the mirror!

3. Switch around what’s in your home.

When you walk into your bedroom, you get cues that it’s a place for sleep. For one, just going into the bed makes you tired. Second, it has more of a sedated atmosphere compared to your living room or kitchen. Walk into a drab, dark room, you’ll feel lifeless and aimless. Walk into a gorgeous, bright room, you’ll feel driven and motivated. Why are stores often times decked out in bright lights, decorations, and music? It’s to promote an image of a brand, of course, but those things also make you feel good.

You can apply the same type of logic to your home. Do you have objects in there that remind you of your old self? (For example, if you’re trying to quit smoking and are going at it cold turkey, do you still have ashtrays lying around?) If you do, those objects are reinforcing your old self image and social role. Best get rid of them. On the flip side, is there anything you would like to add to your home that you currently don’t have, to make it more motivating? Perhaps some new lights, decorations, or photos are in order. If you want to have a major self change, you need to shed the “old you” and get in step with the “new you”. The fastest way to do this? Completely revamp your home environment to be in step with how you want to be, not how you are now. It’d be hard at first, but within a week you’ll feel a complete difference as your current self will become a match for the new person you aligned yourself to become. Try it! It really works.

None of the tips I listed here are especially hard to implement. Test them out and see what works. Some improvement is better than no improvement; each little step you take adds to the bigger picture of moving towards your destiny.