What are the essential self-care habits you must do to be more productive? How does socializing increase your productivity?
While you can’t create more time in your day, Free to Focus by Michael Hyatt says you can make the most of the time you have by taking good care of yourself. Tending to your physical, mental, and emotional well-being will maximize your energy and, consequently, your productivity.
Continue reading for the only daily self-care checklist you’ll ever need.
A Self-Care Checklist for Productivity
Some specific habits in a daily self-care checklist that Hyatt urges you to practice include:
- Sleep: To maximize your energy and productivity, try to get at least seven hours of sleep every night. For more restful sleep, keep your bedroom at a cool temperature and as dark as possible, and avoid looking at screens (TV, phone, computer, and so on) before bed.
- Eat: Your eating habits have a major impact on your energy levels throughout the day. Try to eat mostly natural, unprocessed foods for sustainable long-term energy. Also be mindful of what you drink—juices and sodas tend to be loaded with sugar, which will give you a quick burst of energy followed by a crash shortly afterward.
- Exercise: Regular exercise not only improves your physical health, it also enhances cognitive function and creativity. Just 20-25 minutes of moderate activity per day—such as a brisk walk or a set of yoga exercises—can produce a noticeable difference in your energy and productivity.
- Socialize: Taking time to nurture positive relationships with family, friends, and colleagues pays dividends in terms of both personal well-being and professional success. Not only will spending time with people you like make you happier, it will also give you valuable opportunities to network, ask for advice, and exchange favors. Hyatt recommends evaluating your social circle to determine which people give you the most energy and which leave you feeling drained.
| Tip: One Healthy Habit Can Lead to Many Others Hyatt offers numerous suggestions for healthy self-care habits, but doesn’t go into detail about how to make these lifestyle changes effectively and sustainably. In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg explains that trying to change numerous habits at the same time runs the risk of overwhelming you. Doing too much at once will cause you to become frustrated and discouraged, and it’s likely that you’ll eventually give up on changing your habits. That’s why Duhigg suggests choosing just one new habit to work on and seeing how that one change ripples through your life to prompt other changes. For example, suppose you decide to take Hyatt’s suggestion of exercising 20-25 minutes every day. However, you find that you tend to get stomach pains while exercising—to avoid that discomfort, you might start eating smaller and healthier meals. You also find that the exercise makes you tired, so you start going to bed earlier. Because you went to sleep earlier, you then wake up earlier, so your mornings before work or school are now much less stressful than before. This demonstrates how changing just one core habit (in this case, exercising more regularly) can naturally prompt you to adopt numerous other healthy habits as well. In this way, you can make significant changes to your lifestyle without getting overwhelmed from consciously working on many different habits at once. |
The Essential Daily Self-Care Checklist for Productivity
