11 Ways To Become an Early Riser Like Most Successful People Do

So you’ve noticed all of those happy and productive early risers who always seem to be on top of things. You probably hate them a little–they’re just so damn productive! But a small part of you has probably wondered, lying in bed at 11 a.m., how they do it. Maybe you’ve even thought you’d feel more energized if you could just manage to get up without feeling like crap. Here are a few tips of the trade on how to become an early riser and feel good while doing it.

1. Go to Bed Earlier

Probably the biggest detractor from getting up early is not getting enough sleep. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that if you don’t go to bed so late, you won’t need to sleep late either. Do you really need to be staying up until midnight or later, particularly on a work night? I’m willing to bet that you’re not actually doing anything productive or beneficial. The TV shows and social media can wait; stop wasting your time. You’ll be surprised by how great you feel once you get into an early sleep routine.

2. Have a Consistent Sleep Schedule

Your body thrives on routine. That’s why you get hungry at certain times–your body has been trained to expect it! Establishing a proper sleeping schedule is no different. Furthermore, having a routine will make it easier to get up early. The bad news is that you should start getting up at the same time everyday, including weekends. I know this may be a struggle, but if you don’t do this, your body will be constantly confused about when it should wake up, and getting up early will be all the more difficult.

3. Never Eat Before Bed

I know that a quick pre-bed snack can be tempting, but this is an incredibly bad idea if you want to wake up earlier and feel rested at the same time. Sleep is a time for your body to rest, repair and recharge. It is not a time for digestion. This is because it takes up far too much energy, which can make falling asleep more difficult. If you do manage to visit the land of nod, food digestion will rob you of the strength you’re supposed to be regaining. Even if you do get a full eight hours of sleep, you’ll wake up feeling tired and drained. You certainly won’t feel like getting up early. In short: put the cookie down.

4. Reduce Your Caffeine Intake

This may be an obvious one, but it’s definitely worth mentioning. Less caffeine means that you won’t still be riding its high at 11:30 p.m. I would start by eliminating any kind of caffeinated beverage in the afternoons. I know that this can make life difficult when the mid afternoon sets in, but you need to resist the urge! If you’ve started going to bed earlier you hopefully won’t get these kind of tired attacks anymore anyway. If you really feel like you need some kind of ‘pick me up’ try an energizing snack instead.

5. Never Drink Before Bed

A cheeky little sip before bed may seem like a good idea, particularly if you haven’t yet cut out that afternoon coffee. Despite what people say, drinking alcohol before bed will not help you sleep well, even if it does make you pass out. What it will do, however, is increase your deep sleep cycle and rob you of REM sleep. Because you this, you will feel tired when your alarm clock goes off and be all the more tempted to hit the ‘snooze’ button. As a side note, REM sleep is also needed for proper learning and memory function, so you definitely want to get enough of it.

6. Have a Good Reason to Get Up Early

Getting up early requires motivation, at least initially. Give yourself a good reason to do it. This could be anything from getting tasks done to having something to look forward to. I personally recommend a combination of both. Get up because you need to get stuff done, but make sure you also give yourself a little motivational rewards, whether it be allotted time for a TV show, or a nice brisk walk.

7. Turn Your Reason into a Challenge

Now that you have a reason to be up, make it a challenge! Don’t let yourself fall into a rut or break the routine. Tell yourself that you can and will get up early to complete these tasks and that you’re capable of turning this into a habit. The only person that can truly hold you back is yourself. For those of you with a competitive streak, try using Wake N Shake. It’s an app that makes you and your friends compete and earn achievements for getting your butts out of bed and doing stuff.

8. Start Working Out

Exercise is a fantastic tool for waking up early, firstly because a good workout in the afternoon or evening will leave your body rested and in need of an early sleep. Secondly, working out early in the morning will make you feel energized and ready to conquer the rest of the day. These two ideas may seem to negate each other, but I can assure you that they’ll work in both circumstances.

9. Make Sure Your Alarm Clock is Out of Reach

The oldest trick in the book is sometimes the most effective. Force yourself to get out of bed by putting that pesky alarm clock out across the other side of the room. For added incentive, I recommend downloading a humiliation app such as BetterMe that will post on your Facebook wall that you were ‘too weak to get out of bed’ if you hit snooze. Not embarrassing enough? Go for Aherk. This app will post embarrassing photos of you to all of your social media accounts if you don’t reach your goals. Sure, self blackmail may seem easy enough to dodge, but once you have it set up you can’t get out of it.

10. Go to Bed Calm and Relaxed

Going to bed wound up and stressed will only serve to keep you awake, regardless of how tired you are. Try to go to bed calm and relaxed. If you need a little help in this area, I would recommend yoga, meditation or even a simple relaxing tea such as chamomile.

11. Have an Exciting Breakfast Planned

When all else fails, food is the answer. Seriously, I’m far more motivated to get my tired ass out of bed if I know I have something delicious to eat for breakfast. Now, just because I say ‘delicious’ and ‘exciting’ doesn’t mean it has to be complicated. Personally, I can get excited over a smoothie and juice made from fresh fruit, but then I’m a freak who has her own blueberry bushes. If drinking your breakfast isn’t your style, a simple bacon and eggs or some crunchy muesli can do the trick. Just make sure it’s something that you’ll look forward to, that way you’ll be more likely to get up for it.

– by Tegan Jones

Originally at http://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/11-ways-become-early-riser-like-most-successful-people.html

Thu 16 Jan 14

The More Time We Spend Online, the Less Time We Spend Working

What are we choosing not to spend time on to make room for the hours we all spend each week on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and the like? While numerous articles have worried that such screen time might be coming at the expense of face-to-face socializing, a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests, happily, that that is a relatively small part of the tradeoff. But managers won’t find much comfort in the study’s conclusions. More than anything else, the leisure time we spend online comes at the expense of work.

In the paper, Scott Wallsten of the Technology Policy Institute attempts to measure the offline activities that are crowded out by our online recreation throughout the day, using data from The American Time Use Survey, a government survey that, since 2003, has been asking U.S. citizens how they spend their time. While there are several caveats to the research, it provides a quantitative view of what we do less of to make time for leisure activities online. For every additional minute the average American spends online recreationally, they spend roughly 16 fewer seconds working, nine fewer seconds watching TV, and seven fewer seconds sleeping.

Now for some caveats. In the time use survey, not all common online activities are collected in a single category, and some of the most common ones, including email, online gaming, and videos, are grouped with similar offline activities. (So, for instance, someone watching Netflix counts as “Watching TV and video” and someone playing video games counts in a broader games category.) The category of “computer leisure time,” which Wallsten uses to approximate online leisure time, mostly includes newer online activities that didn’t exist when the survey was created in 2003, including, notably, social media use.

In addition, the study deals with multitasking by asking respondents about the “primary” activity they were involved in at any moment in time, which one could argue fails to capture the use of computers and tablets alongside other offline activities.

Finally, time spent online and the offline activities it replaces vary significantly based on age, income, and other demographics. Not surprisingly, younger people spend more recreational time online, accounting for a higher percentage of their overall leisure time.

Other differences include the fact that women don’t let online leisure time crowd out household activities, whereas men spend eight seconds less on them for every extra minute online. And, somewhat disturbingly, 15- to 19-year-olds spend 20 fewer seconds on educational activities for every extra minute online.

While interesting, none of this will comfort managers concerned about lost productivity as employees spend more time online.

“If you imagine the tradeoff between watching Netflix and watching standard cable TV, that represents a huge fight within the video industry but it still might not affect the size of the economy,” said Wallsten. “But if you’re talking about it coming out of work time, then that could be a significant negative effect.”

And yet he cautions that such concern might be overstated, adding that “the numbers are still small enough that it’s conceivable it has no net negative effect on productivity.”

Indeed, other studies have suggested that workers can be be more productive when given regular breaks to browse the web. Moreover, for some workers at least, time spent on social media can improve work-related knowledge and skills.
If anything, managers should worry about that smaller chunk of sleep that gets crowded out by time spent online. The paper notes that those who can’t sleep might be spending more time online rather than time online causing people to sleep less. But if our online activities are in fact taking time away from sleep, that would mean a real impact on productivity.

– by Walter Frick

Originally at http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/10/the-more-time-we-spend-online-the-less-time-we-spend-working/

Thu 24 Oct 13

Working from home? Here are the do’s and don’ts

Working from home might sound like a dream come true when you consider the prospect of having no commute, working in sweatpants, and doing laundry in the background. But it isn’t easy; it takes discipline and structure, and it’s not for everyone. If you’re thinking of telecommuting, these 10 crucial steps will help keep you productive and employed:

1. Commit to being disciplined.
If you spend your workday doing laundry, organizing your closets, catching up on TV, or surfing the Internet, you’ll not only be abusing your employer’s trust, you may end up out of a job. It’s essential to focus and not get distracted when you work from home.

2. Have set hours, just like you would at work.
If you don’t set working hours and stick to them, it’s too easy to say, “Well, I’ll relax this morning and make up for it by working late tonight,” and then at night decide that you’ll make up the hours later that week. On the flip side, it’s also too easy to end up working well into the night simply if you don’t have a set time to end each day.

3. Create a daily to-do list.
A daily task schedule for yourself can keep you focused. If you find yourself procrastinating anyway, try scheduling out each hour of the day so you know what you need to do when.

4. Train your friends and family not to interrupt you.
Friends and family may think that if you’re working from home, you’re not “really working”. So be clear with them that you shouldn’t be interrupted at home while you’re working any more than you should be at the office. You might need to explain that you’re not available to watch the neighbor’s kids (or your own, for that matter) or do chores around the house.

5. Establish a clear system for communicating with your manager and be vigilant about sticking to it.
If you leave it informal, you’re less likely to have regular communication than you would if you were physically in the office together. For instance, you might decide that (a) you’ll have one regularly scheduled phone meeting per week; (b) you’ll proactively and regularly create opportunities for less formal interaction, since your separate locations mean those won’t pop up organically; (c) you won’t rely on email for sensitive or complicated issues and instead will get on the phone to hash them out; and (d) you’ll visit your headquarters at least twice a year.

6. Be accessible.
As convenient as working from home is for you, it has the potential to inconvenience your co-workers, by making it harder for them to talk to you when they need something. Since they can’t just walk down the hall to your office, go out of your way to be accessible by phone, email, and if your office uses it, instant messaging during the day.

7. Over-communicate.
When you’re telecommuting, you risk losing your connection to your boss and co-workers, and even having people wonder what you’re doing all day. To combat this, proactively let people know where projects stand and what your priorities are for the week. Additionally, while you should always stay on top of your email and phone messages, it’s especially important if you telecommute. If you let emails or phone messages go unanswered, you risk people thinking that you’re not working as hard as you would if your colleagues could see you.

8. Don’t eat while you work.
With your kitchen just a few feet away, it’s easy to find yourself eating more than you would if you were at an office. Many telecommuters gain weight because it’s so easy to snack throughout the day.

9. Find ways to have in-person contact.
Working from home can be isolating. If you find yourself a little too excited to see the FedEx man, it’s time to get out of your house. Try to have lunch once or twice a week with colleagues, networking contacts, or friends outside of your home.

10. Be honest with yourself about whether you’re cut out for telecommuting.
Not everyone is a good fit for working from home. If you’ll feel isolated or give in to temptation to slack off, telecommuting might not be a good choice for you.

– By Alison Green | U.S.News & World Report LP

Originally at http://in.finance.yahoo.com/photos/working-from-home-here-are-the-do-s-and-don-ts-slideshow/a-photo-1339062047.html