Author: Munro Stewart

Spend some time in solitude to think about and create ideas, make plans or goals, and come up with solutions to solve your problems.

• Like many inventors and creative types, Nikola Tesla was an advocate for solitude when creating and working.
• Most famously, he's quoted as saying "The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude.
• No big laboratory is needed in which to think.
• Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind.
• Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born."

Nikola Tesla's Best Productivity Tricks - Lifehacker

Exercise every day because it improves your body, your mind, and makes you happier and more productive on the day in which you exercise.

• A recent study from Penn State university shed some light on the matter and the results are more than surprising.
• They found that to be more productive and happier on a given work day, it doesn’t matter so much, if you work-out regularly, if you haven’t worked out on that particular day.
• Think about starting small and then start even smaller: Here is a little secret.
• When I first started exercising, I did it with 5 minutes per day, 3 times a week.
• Can you imagine that? 5 minutes of timed exercise, 3 times a week?
• That’s nothing you might be thinking.
• And you are right, because the task is so easy and anyone can succeed with it, you can really start to make a habit out of it.
• Try no more than 5 or 10 minutes if you are getting started.

What happens to our brains when we exercise and how it makes us happier - Buffer

Cultivate a positive environment by reading and listening to more positive information and entertainment sources, and choosing to spend time around positive people.

• Who you choose to spend your time with and the input you get from further away like the TV, the internet and magazines will have a huge effect on your outlook.
• To be able to stay positive it is essential to have influences in your life that support you and lift you up instead of dragging you down.
• So carefully consider what you let into your mind.

How to stay positive: 11 Smart habits - Positivity Blog

Get started by doing something for just a couple of minutes, because just getting started can often be the hardest part of many habits, tasks, or things you want to work on or get done.

• If you have to write something, just write a sentence.
• Then get up, get some water, stretch.
• Pat yourself on the back for getting started!
• Now do a little more: write a few more sentences.
• Get up, take a mental break (don’t go to another website), do a few pushups.
• Go back, do a bit more.
• Pretty soon, you’re in the flow of it.

Ways to do what you don’t want to do - Zen Habits

Keep a dated list of tasks and projects you have completed and random things you have done, because looking back on your achievements or even little events from your life may provide a sense of accomplishment and purpose.

• There's something to be said for seeing how much you've gotten done at the end of the day.
• You know how satisfying it is to cross out items on your to do list, and then look back at the list to see everything you completed?
• A "done" list, or "anti-to-do list" as Marc Andreessen calls it, works in a similar fashion: you simply take note of each thing you get done during the day.
• Start out with the date and just list your "done" items underneath.
• Not only will this help you review your productivity at the end of each day and make you feel better about what you got done, but it can be really useful to keep around as a work log.
• You might want to look back in weeks or months to come to see what you were working on or how long a project took to complete.

Clever uses for plain text files that can increase your productivity - Lifehacker

Think positively and change your thoughts or mindset to a new way of thinking about something in order to improve your wellbeing and get things done.

• You are what you think.
• You cannot think negatively and have unlimited success.
• If you think negatively about business and finances [or leisure and relationships, or whatever else you want to change or improve in your life], your subjective experience will be a lack of both, whether or not that is true in reality.
• Discipline your mind towards the goals of what you want your productivity to look like and start putting the effort in right now to get there.
• Keep in mind that suffering over your own suffering doesn't work.
• Know the negative thought patterns you hold which require change and be deliberate in changing them.

8 Ways to radically increase your productivity - The Globe And Mail

Create daily habits and practices to improve your wellbeing, be happier, achieve goals, and make your dreams come true.

• The only way you can make something stick is to create a habit through daily practice.
• So if you want to exercise, set up 10 minutes every day, at the same time of day, when you’re going to do your yoga or pushups or jogging/walking.
• Put it on the calendar, and make it an unmissable appointment.

Feeling determined to change - Zen Habits

Find and meet up with people who are doing things that you are interested in doing.

• Find people online doing interesting things, meet up with them in real life.
• Find people who are passionate, who are building things, who are pushing themselves, who dream big, who are mindful and joyful and healthy and friendly and shy and gregarious and adventurous and curious.
• Befriend them. Be there for them. Be helpful. Make them laugh.
• These are your people.

Advice for people in their early 20s - Zen Habits

The solution or explanation with the fewest amount of steps or assumptions should often be preferred in order to simplify the solution down to its essential factor or factors.

• In philosophy, Occam's razor (also spelled Ockham's razor or Ocham's razor; Latin: novacula Occami) is the problem-solving principle that recommends searching for explanations constructed with the smallest possible set of elements.
• It is also known as the principle of parsimony or the law of parsimony (Latin: lex parsimoniae).
• Attributed to William of Ockham, a 14th-century English philosopher and theologian, it is frequently cited as "Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem", which translates as "Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity", although Occam never used these exact words.
• Popularly, the principle is sometimes inaccurately paraphrased as "The simplest explanation is usually the best one."
• This philosophical razor advocates that when presented with competing hypotheses about the same prediction, one should prefer the one that requires the fewest assumptions and that this is not meant to be a way of choosing between hypotheses that make different predictions.

Occam's Razor - Wikipedia

80% of the result comes from 20% of your time, work, or activities, so realize that 80% could be good enough for many tasks or goals by focusing on the essential 20% of your habits and activities.

• This is one of the best ways to make better use of your time.
• The 80/20 rule - also known as The Pareto Principle - basically says that 80 percent of the value you will receive will come from 20 percent of your activities.
• So a lot of what you do is probably not as useful or even necessary to do as you may think.
• You can just drop - or vastly decrease the time you spend on - a whole bunch of things.

16 Things I Wish They Had Taught Me In School - Positivity Blog

80% of the results will often come from 20% of the causes, so focus on finding the vital few inputs or actions that will provide the most benefit or effect.

• The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes (the "vital few").
• Other names for this principle are the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity.
• Management consultant Joseph M. Juran developed the concept in the context of quality control and improvement after reading the works of Italian sociologist and economist Vilfredo Pareto, who wrote about the 80/20 connection while teaching at the University of Lausanne.
• In his first work, Cours d'économie politique, Pareto showed that approximately 80% of the land in the Kingdom of Italy was owned by 20% of the population.

Pareto Principle - Wikipedia

Give honest and sincere appreciation. - Dale Carnegie

• Lincoln once began a letter saying: "Everybody likes a compliment."
• William James said: "The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated."
• He didn't speak, mind you, of the "wish" or the "desire" or the "longing" to be appreciated.
• He said the "craving" to be appreciated.
• Let's try to figure out the other person's good points.
• Then forget flattery. Give honest, sincere appreciation.

How To Win Friends And Influence People - Goodreads

"Don't criticize, condemn, or complain." - Dale Carnegie

• Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself.
• Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person's precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment.
• Instead of condemning people, let's try to understand them.
• Let's try to figure out why they do what they do.
• That's a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism; and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness.
• "To know all is to forgive all."

How To Win Friends And Influence People - Goodreads

Positively influence other people's lives by telling them you believe in them, you think they are a good person, they possess particular good qualities, and you expect they will perform well because they have the ability to do so.

• The Pygmalion effect is a psychological phenomenon in which high expectations lead to improved performance in a given area and low expectations lead to worse.
• It is named after the Greek myth of Pygmalion, the sculptor who fell so much in love with the perfectly beautiful statue he created that the statue came to life.
• According to the Pygmalion effect, the targets of the expectations internalize their positive labels, and those with positive labels succeed accordingly.
• A similar process works in the opposite direction in the case of low expectations.
• The idea behind the Pygmalion effect is that increasing the leader's expectation of the follower's performance will result in better follower performance.
• Within sociology, the effect is often cited with regard to education and social class.

Pygmalion Effect - Wikipedia

Your beliefs and thoughts influence your mind and your life, so any expectations you have about your self, your character, your abilities, your goals, and your dreams can and often will come true if you believe they will.

• A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that comes true at least in part as a result of a person's belief or expectation that said prediction would come true.
• In the phenomena, people tend to act the way they have been expected to making the expectations come true.
• Self-fulfilling prophecies are an example of the more general phenomenon of positive feedback loops.
• A self-fulfilling prophecy can have either negative or positive outcomes.
• Merely applying a label to someone or something can affect the perception of the person/thing and create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Self-fulfilling Prophecy - Wikipedia

Begin with the end of your task, goal, project, or dream in your mind by mentally envisioning it and creating a written description or picture of exactly what you want the end result to look like when the project or vision is completed.

• To begin with the end in mind means to start with a clear understanding of your destination.
• It means to know where you're going so that you better understand where you are now and so that the steps you take are always in the right direction.
• "Begin with the end in mind" is based on the principle that all things are created twice.
• There's a mental or first creation, and a physical or second creation to all things.
• Take the construction of a home, for example.
• You create it in every detail before you ever hammer the first nail into place.
• You try to get a very clear sense of what kind of house you want.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - Goodreads

Influence your mind positively and change your life for the better by using the principle of autosuggestion.

• Through the dominating thoughts which one permits to remain in the conscious mind, whether these thoughts be negative or positive is immaterial, the principle of autosuggestion voluntarily reaches the subconscious mind and influences it with these thoughts.
• Recall what has been said about the subconscious mind resembling a fertile garden spot, in which weeds will grow in abundance, if the seeds of more desirable crops are not sown therein.
• Autosuggestion is the agency of control through which an individual may voluntarily feed his subconscious mind on thoughts of a creative nature, or, by neglect, permit thoughts of a destructive nature to find their way into this rich garden of the mind.

Think And Grow Rich - Goodreads

Consider using simple text files to help you get things done and keep track of your tasks, todo lists, projects, and goals, instead of using a complicated tasks app.

• While I love the apps mentioned above, I personally look for super simple.
• So I’ve settled on a setup taken from Gina and Adam’s articles on Lifehacker (read the tutorials: Geek to Live and Hack Attack).
• Text files: Basically, I organize my tasks in a series of text files.
• That’s because they’re super simple, easy to manipulate, and small.

Amazing Mac apps for getting things done (plus a custom-rigged setup) - Zen Habits