Dec 24, 2013, 18:43 IST

How I approach everyday

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I approach every day.


Don’t Overestimate Your Abilities to Adapt.

A lot of people believe that they can effortlessly jump between two different activities and still perform optimally.They’re wrong.  When planning the to-dos for tomorrow or next week, most people tend to be time and efficiency optimists. They think that they can get a lot more things done in the course of a day than they’re really capable of doing.They overestimate their abilities.

For some reason they always think they’re going to be much more efficient tomorrow than they were today.People inaccurately assume that they can just shift from one action point on their to-do list onto the next while retaining their state of optimal productivity.

But that’s rarely the case.

The majority of people need micro breaks for approximately 1-15 minutes in between intense work or study sessions in order to stay highly focused; usually more than that prior to, or after, physical exercise.

Don’t assume 100 % constant efficiency!


1. Identify Key Activities

The first thing you need to do is to identify the key activity of the day.There’s usually going to be one or two things that are much more important than the rest of the things on your to-do list during one day. These activities are those that will yield the highest investment on time spent doing them, so it makes a lot of sense to do them before you do anything else.

The key activities are those that you will benefit the most from doing, therefore it’s imperative that you do whatever is within your control to get yourself perform them as well as you can.

You do this by figuring out what your ideal state for carrying out the key activity is.

You do it through preparation and practice.

As a rule of thumb it takes at the very least a couple of minutes to get into a good state if you’re not already in one it, so don’t be disappointed if you find that it takes a while to get into your ideal state.

2. Get into the Ideal State

To prepare for the coming key activity you must use whatever situation you are currently in to your advantage by taking small steps towards your ideal state for performing the key activity.

Let’s assume that you want to make a sale, give a presentation, or meet a person of the opposite sex later in the day. You’ve decided that’s your key activity for the day.

What is then the ideal state for doing all three of these things?

It’s to be socially warmed-up so that you’re being warm and friendly to others and can easily establish rapport with them.

How do I prepare and practice for this?

The way to prepare for this is by deliberately setting out to talk to as many people as you can in beforehand.

Can you be a bit more specific?

In the above example where the optimal state was to warm up socially, you could do the following:

·         Speaking to complete strangers. Ask them for the time or some other arbitrary thing. The bolder the better in terms of warming up. Remember, you are using these people as a means of warming up..

·         Start your day by speaking up ASAP to establish a positive pattern. Raise your hand and assert your opinion or ask a question during meetings or lectures. The point isn’t to be brilliant or say smart stuff, but to warm up socially!

·         Call someone and speak for a long period of time. It is the easiest and “safest” thing to do, but it is probably the least efficient way as well.

·         Shoot a video log in public. This is guaranteed to give you an adrenaline rush and boost your social muscles for a while.

Mental Rehearsal

Another helpful way for getting into the ideal state is to use mental rehearsal, or visualization if you will.

Let me give you a well-known example.

It has been shown that people who merely think about working out are able to grow the size and strength of their muscles. The muscles grow by an act of thought; no observable physical movement was involved. This proves that the mental process of exercise is more important than the physical process. You should do this as well, because it is highly efficient.

Before you begin doing your key activity of the day, see yourself doing it in your mind ís eye with excellence.

Before you rush off to your workout, take five minutes to relax and visualize yourself lifting the weights with some skills.

The same goes for a presentation, closing a sale, or going on a date.

First see yourself succeed in your head, and then proceed to succeed for real.


As you see, to conquer inefficient planning and execution, it’s really just a three-stage framework that you need to learn to think in terms of as you plan and then proceed to go about your day:

·         Key activity. Which 1-2 things most important today?

·         Ideal state. What state will be the most conducive to performing the key activity?

·         Preparation. How can I best prepare and put myself in the ideal state?

Then it becomes a matter of staying focused on this framework and soon you will be able to see any situation you are in as a means of jumpstarting your state in the direction of the ideal state. For example, if you’re commuting by bus and your key activity requires you to be social, you will start talking to the person sitting next to you.The more you do it, the better you become at taking responsibility for getting into your ideal state, and the easier it becomes for the brain to identify these situations.

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