A concept that I love to use is what I call “just 5 more”.

“Just 5 more” is something you think to yourself when you’re near the end of whatever type of session you’re doing, whether it’s physical training or doing productive work. When you’ve reached the goal that you set yourself, instead of stopping, say to your “Actually I’ll do just 5 more” of whatever you’re doing. This could means you’ll do an extra 5 minutes of working out or write down another 5 ideas when you’re brainstorming. When I’m out doing creative photography, it means I’ll take another 5 shots from a different angle.

Often your tired by the end of a session, but you’re not really as tired as you think, and you can easily put in some more effort. When you do “just 5 more”, you’ll often trigger a second wind and do far more than just 5, you may in-fact do 30 more.

Doing this is less comfortable than simply stopping, it’s grittier and it requires more discipline. Yet the results are totally worth it – sacrificing a little bit of short-term comfort for more results is always a good trade.

I also like to take a longer term view of whatever I’m doing. Ask questions such as:

• How does what I’m doing right now fit into the greater scheme of my long term goals?
• If I work harder now will it help me reach my goals faster?
• When I look back on my performance at the end of today, how much better will I feel if I do “just 5 more” rather than simply stopping?

Time-boxing is a productivity technique where you work solidly on a single task for a set period of time. By doing this you make use of your concentration when it’s at its highest so you work very efficiently. It’s the basically the same thing as the Pomodoro method.

Your ability to concentrate on a particular tasks goes down after a while. Your concentration usually peaks so after starting work on a task and this peak lasts for between 5 and 60 minutes, depending on a bunch of factors.

Bad concentration sneaks up on us, when it hits us we generally don’t realise it. We start having mini sleeps at our desk and go off into la-la land. We catch ourselves starting blankly at a computer screen and realise that we haven’t done any work for 5 minutes, and can’t even remember what we were doing.

It’s a simple fact that our concentration only lasts so long and you need to work around that. Time-boxing is a productivity technique that recognises this and explicitly tells you to take a break.

With time-boxing you designate a certain amount of time to work solidly on a task. When the time is up you relax. After a period of relaxing you do another time-box.

When you’re doing a time-box you work on ONE task. Multi-tasking is absolutely forbidden. If you have a whole bunch of applications on your computer, close everything which isn’t required for the task which you’re currently working on.

The first time you try this technique, I’d recommend a 10 minute time-box before relaxing. This is a relatively short amount of time and you should be able to fully concentrate on the task for the entire time. When you’re done, have a break, and then do another 10 minutes.

Different tasks have different levels of mental challenge, for challenging ones you should use a shorter period of time. When you’re doing tasks that are challenging, in particular tasks you haven’t had much practice with, you have to consciously think about things a whole lot more. If you are well practiced in the task and the challenge level is lower, you can reliable concentrate for longer periods of time because it’s all second nature to you.

Your brain works better at different times of the day. If you’re the type of person who works really well first thing in the morning then you may time-box for 45 minutes comfortably, while for the evening you may find that 15 minutes is better. This is perfectly normal.

When relaxing I recommend you physically get out of your chair and move someplace, for instance go to the kitchen and drink a glass of water. Doing something physical is far more stimulating and refreshing then simply sitting at your desk and then flicking open a browser window and looking at some online nonsense. You want your breaks to be as mentally refreshing as possible so that you’re in a good state for the next time-box.

If you only get part-way through the time-box and you just can’t concentrate anymore, then you should have an extended break. Ideally, you’ll go for a long walk or a workout. If this isn’t feasible because you’re chained to your desk, then just take it real easy for however long as you need until you can feel your brain switching back on. If you must do actual work because you work in a high pressure environment, switch to the easiest project you have so that you can mentally coast through it. This could well be the ‘tidy my desk’ project.

With time-boxing you become a lot more aware of how efficiently your brain is working at any point in time. When you become more aware you’ll automatically take actions which help keep you your energy and concentration levels. When you’re not working, keeping your brain in an optimal state via rest, exercise and nutrition becomes your focus.

Most successful people are earlier risers.

When you wake up early, you tend to have a really productive patch soon after rising, giving you momentum that carries right throughout they day. Logically it shouldn’t make a difference because you’re awake just as many hours, but for whatever reason, probably some deep seated biological thing, waking up early just makes you a lot more productive.

However, even with the best of intentions it can be really difficult getting up at 5am, feeling groggy while it’s freezing outside the confines of your nice warm comfy bed.  It just seems, unreasonable.

There are two key things to master – a) actually getting enough sleep, and b) managing to get out of bed.

Consistently getting your 8 hours shut-eye while is really hard if you approach it the wrong way. Typically when people want to wake up at a certain time they subtract 8 hours from it and go to bed then. Let’s say you normally get up at 7am and you want to start waking up at 5am so you jump into bed at 9pm. BIG mistake. You’re pretty much guaranteed to have a horrible nights sleep full of insomnia because you simply won’t be sleepy enough. You’ll toss and turn for an hour or so, sort of fall asleep then wake up a couple of hours later. Then you’ll be awake for another couple of hours in which you’ll contemplate how completely tired you’re going to be the next day. You’ll be worse off then if you simply went to bed at 11pm like you normally do.

The best way to get up at 5am is to go to sleep when you feel sleepy, never before.  Then wake up at 5am on the dot – and I mean actually get up as in out of the bed (see below for how to ensure this). And yes you’ll be tired the first time you do this guaranteed, so make sure you haven’t got too much on that day.

The following day your goal is exactly the same – wake up at 5am. It’ll be easier because after the first night you’ll be shattered and probably fall into bed about 9.30pm and sleep well, probably not enough to catch up on the sleep your short of so you’ll still be tired the next day.

The secret to make this last is that you must now wake up at 5am (or whatever time you choose) every single day – that’s right 7 days a week. Keep going to bed whenever you feel sleepy. If you’re tired at 9pm then go to bed, if you’re a bit more energetic and stay up until 11.30pm, then stay up. However DO NOT vary what time you wake up – it’ll make it nearly impossible to get in to a proper routine and before you know it you’ll be back to square one.

After a surprisingly short time, your body will get used to this new routine and you’ll have the strange experience of being awake before 99% of everyone else.  You’ll be fully operational before the sun’s come up – it’s really cool!

At first, when you’re not used to getting up so early and your alarm goes off you’ll probably start swearing and hit that stupid thing and think hey this is really warm and comfortable in here and I’ll just stay here for another minute and zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

When that alarm goes off you MUST get out of bed and leave the bedroom ASAP. Otherwise it’s just way too tempting to go back to bed and fall asleep again almost instantely. Comfort is the enemy! The best way to do this is to place your alarm clock on the other side of the room by the door before you go to bed. This way you’re forced to physically get out of bed, stand up and walk to the door. Now exit the room, have a pee and viola! You’ve now succesfully woken up at a ridiculously early time. Congrats! Go make your self a coffee and a nice english muffin.

This newfound time at the start of the day is EXTREMELY productive time because there’s your brain is at its freshest and there’s no-one around to distract you. So get a move on! Don’t waste your focus looking at news website or facebook or whatever your favorite method of procrastination is, get straight in to your work! Before you know it BAM! 9am and you’ve achieved more than most people do in a whole work day

Feeling like you should do something but failing to take action it is a common problem for a lot of people. You’ll tend to unconsciously employ it as a short-term coping strategy because “doing stuff” feels as though it’ll be painful. Paradoxically, you’ll always feel way better if you simply took action and did what needs doing rather than finding ways to avoid it.

Procrastination can happen for a variety of reasons and can solved by using the right strategy . Here are some common reasons and solutions.

Too much to do so ostrich

If your to-do list is too large you may deal with it by going into denial i.e. bury your head in the sand like an ostrich. Obviously, this isn’t the most productive thing in the world

If there is simply too much for you to do then your first step should be elimination. Go through your list and prioritise what’s a must have and what’s merely a nice to have. Once you’ve done this start from the bottom up and delete the nice to have’s until your list is a manageable size. The fastest way to get something “done” is to realise that you don’t actually need it.

If your list is still too large after elimination, you should look at ways to delegate the least important and/or more robotic tasks to other people.

A related problem to this is perfectionism – a perfectionist will think they have to do literally three times as much work as they need to in order to not feel guilty. If you feel like this then hit yourself on the head with a hammer and purposely do a bad, messy job. Laugh as your create garbage, then ship it.

External stress and bad health

Your mental state is strongly correlated with your physical state. What this means is that you think far more clearly when you are healthy and rested. Subsequently, you’re won’t be able to think and act very well if you are beaten down and stressed out from too many negative things going on in your life.

The solution is to make getting adequate sleep, nutrition and exercise (even if just a 30 minute walk) a part of your daily life. If you’re not getting any of these because you have too much going on in your life then your priorities are out of whack and you simply must eliminate whatever you can in order to get what your body requires to be healthy.

Bad habits

If you make a regular habit of staying out late, getting drunk and waking up the next morning hung-over, it’s going to be pretty difficult to get anything done.

You might need to consider your priorities and which habits, relationships and interactions are good for you and which are poisoning you. If you recognise that something’s bad for you then you should eliminate it. This includes unhealthy friendships. Yes, I’m saying you should ditch your friends if they do more harm than good. It’s really not hard to find new ones to replace them who actually enrich your life.

Lethargy

Sometimes we beat ourselves up because we plan to do 3 hours solid work on a project. What can happen is that halfway through we start physically fading yet still expect ourselves to be just as productive as when we were fresh. This isn’t realistic. Get up and take regular breaks. You may even need a 2 hour break so jump in your car and drive some place for a coffee and chillax. You work so much better when you are rested.

Also remember to drink plenty of water – dehydration can sneak up rendering you stupid.

Project is incongruent with your values and passions

If you’re not passionate about what you’re doing then you should give up now. I’m serious. Ditch the project now and move on to something else.

Personal development literature always makes the point of working out what your passions are before dedicating large amount of time to your endeavours. If you’re incongruent with your passions then it’s an uphill battle all the way. Willpower only lasts so long until you start asking your “Why am i even doing this? I hate it”. If you can think back and remember how you felt at the start of this project and you can reconnect with that, then this will get you through short term energy slumps. Otherwise, flick the kill switch and move on to something that you love instead.

Achieving long-term goals goes a long way to improving your life and requires you to consistently work at them over a long period of time. Most people get excited when they start on a long-term goal but soon find themselves doing less-and-less once the initial excitement has worn off. One day they realise they’ve done nothing towards the goal for months and give up. Other people do worse and don’t even get started because the size of the goal overwhelms them and they don’t know where to begin. Successful people approach goal-achievement differently from most people and you so can you if you’re willing to learn and work for it.

The secret to achieving your long-term goals is to chunk them down in to smaller projects, then chunk down these smaller projects down to achievable tasks and schedule in these tasks in to your calendar so that you always know what to do and when to do it. Your natural day-to-day routine becomes one where you’re constantly working towards your long-term goals without really thinking about it.

In this article I’ll share with you my own personal system for achieving long term goals. This system is something I derived from several other systems I’ve read about online and adapted to what works for me personally. The system consist of:

• The initial creation of several planning documents
• On-going retrospective analysis, which are called “retros” for short
• On-going updates of your planning documents
• Doing scheduled tasks several times a day

The initial planning takes around 20 hours investment if done properly which on the face of it seems like a lot. Personally I did this in small chunks over the space of a few weeks. If this is the first time you’ve done something like this then it’s fine if you simply skip large amounts of this this processes and focus on a couple of things to get yourself started. If all you do is take a project you’ve been meaning to do for a while, chunk it down in to smaller tasks and then do those tasks then I’d consider that a great success.

Using Google for everything
Google docs and google calendar are freely available tools and are just fantastic because they live “in the cloud” meaning they’re accessible from any computer with an internet connection. The benefit of this is you can usually access everything from both your home and work internet connections and not have to worry about keeping your copies of files in sync or ever loosing anything. I use google tools pretty much exclusively and refer to them in this article though if you’re more comfortable with something else then that’s fine.

Planning
Planning involves working out the the things in your life that you’ll focus your efforts on. You’ll create long term goals, 90 day projects and daily tasks. The end result is that you’ll have an accessible list of tasks that you can easily knock-off throughout your day. The lists/tools that you’ll use are:

• A Google docs document that outlines your long-term goals and 90-day projects
• A Google docs spreadsheet that has your 90-day projects chunked down to individual tasks
• Google calendar which has time allocated to individual projects and tasks
• A smartphone to sync up with google calendar so that you get reminders to do tasks throughout the day

Long term goals
The first step is to work out what long-term goals you’d like to achieve within the next few years. These don’t need to be things that you’re currently doing, they just need to be things that you’re personally interested in. They should be ambitious goals and it would mean that you would’ve grown a lot as a person when you achieve them. A good way to create subheadings for different areas of your life and write down goals underneath them. After you’ve done this you can keep the ones that you feel passionate about and delete the others ones which don’t really interest you. You can use the following subheadings to get you started:

• Skill set
• Career
• Relationships
• Social
• Fitness
• Health
• Dietary
• Sleep patterns
• Hobbies
• Financial
• Possessions
• Travel

90 day goals and projects
You’ll probably have a somewhat daunting list of long-term goals and it’s probably not realistic to tackle them all at one. So the next step is to take a subset of your long-term goals and turn them into projects which you’ll work on for the next 90 days (roughly 3 months). All the other projects you haven’t included can wait until another quarter. Use the 90 day quarters January-March, April-June, July-September, October-December, if you’re halfway through a quarter then make your goals go the the end of the current quarter, so they may be 26 day goals which is fine.

A good way to write goals is in present tense and make them quantifiable. Present tense mean they’re written as if you’ve already achieved them so instead of “I want a million dollar” you’d write “I’ve earned a million dollars”. Quantifiable means they have a numerical metric attached to them so you can track your progress and you know when they’ve been achieved. For example the goal “I want to be better at running” should be written as “I can run 20km” or even better “I have run a half marathon (21km)”.

The difficulty of goals is important so that you feel motivated to achieve them. You don’t want it them so easy you’re not inspired, nor do you want goals that feel so unrealistic you won’t even try. You should set goals that are mostly within your current skills set and achievable when you stretch yourself.

Project/Task spreadsheet
This is a google docs spreadsheet that has each project listed with tasks underneath alongside the number of hours estimated to complete the task. I’ll have this open constantly when I’m working on a project and will highlight the task that I’m working on and delete it once it’s been completed. Tasks are constantly being added to the list when appropriate. Projects are sorted top to bottom by priority and then by the total estimated hours, shortest to longest, for projects that share the same priority. If you want to segregate projects and have more than one spreadsheet you can add another tab down the bottom of spreadsheet. You might find it useful to separate life changing 90-day projects with more mundane weekend projects like fixing a tap.

Google calendar + smartphone
Putting your tasks in to a calendar is an absolutely fantastic way to keep your life on schedule. Better still, if you own a half-way decent smartphone you’ll be able to sync the calendar in your phone with Google calendar meaning you’ll carry you calendar around with you all day. Personally I use an Nokia E63 with I’m just in love with. By default any task that I have synced from Google calendar will have an phone alarm that goes off 10 minutes before it’s due so I’ll always be reminded to do that task when it’s time.

When you start scheduling tasks on your todo list into Google calendar and getting phone alarms all the time this truly amazing thing happens – you actually start doing all these tasks you intend to do instead of the usual procrastination routine. It’s awesome!

Retrospective analysis
Retrospective analysis, or as I call it “retros”, is the simple process of looking back over a time period and looking at what went well, what didn’t go so well and working out what adjustments could be made going forward. The time periods used are:

• Daily
• Weekly
• Monthly
• Quarterly

Use a single google docs document for all your retros and write the most recent retro at the top of the document. You’ll probably never look at old ones so you don’t need a clever filing system.

To do a retro, open your retros document and create three subheadings:

• Things that went well
• Things that didn’t go so well
• Adjustments to make going forwards

Underneath each subheading just write stuff down for the appropriate time period (day, week, month or quarter) Write stuff down without any regard to readability because nobody will ever read this so just do a quick brain dump! You can write sentences or bullet points, it doesn’t matter.

Schedule in time do to retros as recurring events in Google calendar.

Nightly retro
Daily retros are done shortly before going to bed each night and take around 5 minutes. Typically I’ll write about things like interactions with other people that went well, what my energy levels were like and if I achieved tasks that I’d set for myself. I’ll also include interesting novel things that I’d never done before. Adjustments to make often includes no longer eating certain foods or avoiding certain activities because they don’t agree with me.

Daily planning
At the start of each day after you morning shower, do a quick plan of what you’re going to go today. Look at your scheduled tasks for the day and add in any extra things and reschedule others if appropriate. Doing this reminds you of what you need to achieve each day and gives you focus. This is a positive way to start your day and only takes you a couple of minutes.

Weekly retros and planning
Weekly retros are similar to daily retros though you look back over an entire week instead of just a day and it take around 15-30 minutes. These are best done at the end of the week on Sunday though it’s OK to do them on Saturday instead. You’ll have a higher level view than the daily retros and you’ll see things like if you’re calendar was well balanced or not and how productive you are. You can also work out what new things you want to achieve next week and update your tasks and calendar accordingly.

Monthly retro and planning
These are down at the end of each month in preparation for the next one coming up and take around 30-60 minutes. These are similar to daily/weekly retros with an even bigger time frame to look back over. Looking back over a month is great because it’s so easy to forget what you were doing last week and you’ll see how well 90-day projects are progressing.

At this point you also do a review of your 90-day projects and decide if you want to continue with the project and if so whether you want to keep the existing goals or modify them slightly. If you decided not to continue with a project because you’ve discovered that you’re really not that interested in it then that’s fine, that’s part of learning about who are are and what you like, so just choose another project to take its place.

Quarterly retro and planning
These are major session which you do at these end of each quarter in preparation for the following one which will take you 1-2 hours. Here you can see if you managed to reach the goals you set for yourself 90 days ago – and if you did then congratulations! Take time to reflect on your feelings and what you’ve learned on this journey. And by reflect I mean type a lot of words in to your computer

Now that you’ve completed this quarter it’s time to repeat what you did 3 months ago and take subset of your long-term goals and turn them in to 90-day projects. Refer to the section earlier in this article on how to do this.

In a further 3 months you’ll repeat this process again