This is Five Minute Friday, Start a Great Day.
Welcome back to the SuperDataScience Podcast, ladies and gentlemen. Super excited to have you on the show today. Today, I wanted to share one of the hacks and life hacks that I found for myself, I found very useful. When I don’t follow it, I have chaos in my life, in my day. When I follow it, everything is structured, and I accomplish great things, and then I feel super happy and satisfied, fulfilled at the end of my day. Could be in the middle of my day, even.
That technique is on how to start your day to make it a success. There’s two parts to it. One is more related to your psychology, and the other one is more related to how you get things done. The part that is related to your psychology is, and actually both have a certain timing associated to them. The timing is to get things planned, get yourself in the right state, and get things planned before the start of the day. If you go into your day, and you’re in a bad mind set and, at the same time, you don’t have things planned out for the day, you’re going to have very likely a chaotic day, and you’re not going to accomplish what you wanted to accomplish, and what you could’ve accomplished, and therefore, you’re not going to be fulfilled or as fulfilled as you could be.
The way to avoid that is first of all getting yourself into the right mindset. That, my friends, is at the start of your day to say three things. Just take a moment for 10 minutes or 15 minutes. Go have a breath of fresh air, breathe deep, do some breathing exercises, maybe a bit of meditation, but the main thing is think of three things you’re grateful for, three things that you are grateful for in your life right now, three things that have happened to you.
It could be somebody you met recently or something that happened to you a few years ago or something that you have that you are very excited about or something that you’re looking forward to in your life. Just think of three things, and like, I’ve heard this exercise before, but only recently I figured out the actual trick to it or the proper way of doing it. Those three things should make you smile. It should just be things like, “Okay, check that box. All right, I’m happy about my health,” or, “I’m happy about that I have the job that I have.”
No, it should be things that actually you pause, and you think, and when you imagine them in your head, imagine them in your mind, they make you smile. Because when they make you smile, that is true gratitude, you’re really then happy and grateful for having those things in your life or having had those things in your life.
Once you do that, the magic of this is that you cannot feel miserable or sad or unhappy or fearful or doubtful when you’re grateful. Gratitude takes away all those other feelings. It kind of resets you and puts in the right state of mind. Very, very powerful my friends.
The second thing is have a plan. If you don’t have a target, you will miss every time, as the saying goes. Have a plan of what you’re going to do. Have a list of items, preferably in the form of an RPM, which Tony Robbins advocates the Rapid Planning Method. We talked about it on the podcast in one of the previous episodes. That was episode 158 if you want to check it out.
But have a plan of what you’re going to do, like at least three main items that you’re going to accomplish in that day, preferably in order of importance or order in that order you want to go about them.
Then once you do start your day, you don’t have to think about it, you don’t have to be like once you finish one item, you jump into next one, or you get an email, and you don’t know if you should answer an email or continue working. You should just do the things that are listed in your to-do list, or your Rapid Planning Method list, your RPM list, and once you accomplish them, then everything else, you can focus one everything else.
But that’s why a lot of us get into, tied into, jumping on, first thing we do when we wake up or first thing we do when we get to work is we check our emails. But if you have a list of things you need to do, you want to accomplish this day, then the whole game is changed. You’re going to first focus on those things. That’s the correct way. In my view, that’s the correct way of going about it, focusing on what you actually want to accomplish, and then all that other minutia can come in afterwards, after you’ve accomplished these one, two, or three things that you identified for yourself.
And so again the right mindset, plan your day. But the other tip here is, it’s great to do that in the morning, first thing in the morning, but it’s even better to do both of those things in the evening. And here’s why. Because in terms of the planning, when you plan something in the evening, your mind starts working on it during the night and you wake up, you don’t have to even spend time planning, it’s already planned out. You already know what you’re going to be doing. You dive straight into it. So there is no uncertainty, there is no doubt. There’s no chance of deviating from that plan, from that direction that you’ve set for yourself.
So that’s why planning is important. The way I think of it is when you’re writing a book, the best way to end your day is to end it in the middle of a sentence. Don’t end your book, don’t end like the day by finishing a sentence or even worse, finishing a whole paragraph or a chapter. If you finish a chapter at the end of a day, then the next day’s gonna be super hard to get started because you are starting a new chapter. It’s a whole new thing, a whole new challenge you have to overcome to force yourself to get into it. Whereas if you finish your day in the middle of a sentence, you don’t even put a full stop, then the next day, it’s very easy to pick up and to keep going from there.
Same thing with this. Like when you plan out your day in the evening, it’s like you already got a head start on the following day. So when you get into the next day, it’s already started, you don’t have to gather a lot of willpower to get your day started. You already started your day in the previous evening. So that’s one thing. Another thing in terms of gratitude, if you say your three gratitude’s in the morning, that’s great. But if you say them in the evening, that’s even better because that way you’re gonna be sleeping. Your whole night, your mind is going to be at rest, it’s gonna be at ease. You’re gonna go to bed feeling grateful. You’re gonna go to bed not feeling any fear, doubt, hate or any of those negative emotions. You’re gonna get rid of them before going to bed.
And so you’re gonna rest up feeling great and you’ll wake up feeling great. And you can say more gratitude in the morning if you like to keep that trend going, just like put a smile on your face and dive straight into it.
So there’s just two things. Make sure to say something that you’re gonna feel grateful for. Three things ideally and also plan your day and ideally do all of that before going to be so you can dive into the new day in a few hours when you wake up and be ready, fresh and already have a plan of action and not have to use willpower to get started.
So there we go. That’s my quick life hack on having a great day. In most cases, it works for me. It’s got a very high chance of success and I really hope you’ll try it out and it’ll work for you. Thank you for being here today. I look forward to seeing you back here next time. Until then, happy analyzing.
