This is actually a tough one for me right now. My daily routine is in a bit of a mess and I’m not feeling too successful at the moment. However, there are a number of habits that have helped me greatly in smoothing out some of the rough patches. While these might not be things you can necessarily pencil into a schedule every day, they are definitely habits of thinking that can help you to be successful.

1. Do the most important thing first. I recently posted about putting first things first and I think this is a really important habit. Since many of us complain of not having enough hours in the day, getting the most important things done first thing helps us to accomplish something of value each and every day.

2. Keep your goals in mind. Every day should be a day that you do something that moves you even a little bit closer to achieving your goals. Every long term and even short term goal can be broken down into smaller pieces. Make a list of these and make sure to do something every day that contributes to one of these goals.

3. Do things that make you happy. This one is often overlooked in the big picture of dealing with everyday life. We get caught up in working, taking care of families, writing blog posts, doing chores, etc, and forget to do something that is purely and selfishly about me. I use the word selfish, but I don’t mean it in a negative sense at all. Each of us will be happier when we do things for ourselves. We need to set aside time to just be ourselves rather than a father, worker, significant other, or any of the countless other roles we may take in life. Spend a little time reading books, tying flies, building birdhouses, learning golf or a new language, anything that makes you happy.

4. Slow down. At the risk of mentioning the fast pace of life yet again in this post, I think it’s necessary to slow down every once in a while and take stock of where we are. If you don’t know where you are in terms of making progress toward your goals, it makes it that much harder to get there. Also, it’s important to sometimes put things off until another day or time. I’m not talking about procrastination here; I’m talking about focusing on what’s most important right here and right now and doing only that. If that happens to be writing a blog post, then great. If it happens to be playing with your small child, then that is sometimes the most important thing in the world for you, too.

5. Listen. Yes, I mean really listen. We are deluged with information in one form or another in today’s world. Radio, television, and the internet are only a few of the information sources on top of the ones everyone’s been dealing since the beginning of humankind, namely family, friends, neighbors, and the coworkers we interact with on a daily basis. This amounts to a flood of input for our poor minds. In the midst of all of this, it’s easy to ignore some of the most important inputs, like a friend’s need for a sympathetic ear or a child’s need for recognition. Just taking a moment to put your self aside and open up your ears and mind to someone else can do wonders for both your relationship and your understanding of the world.

I hope you find these tips to be helpful in some way. Realizing the importance of these things and the process of beginning to incorporate them into my daily life has changed my life for the better and continues to do so. I’m going to tag the following people:

Chris of The BizTechie Chronicles
Mark of 45n5
Cesar of Flee The Cube
Digital Nomad of The Sovereign Journey
Tisha of Serenity Quest

When I say empathic listening, I mean listening with intent to understand. I mean seeking first to understand, to really understand. It’s an entirely different paradigm.

Covey goes on to say:

Empathy is not sympathy. Sympathy is a form of agreement, a form of judgement … The essence of empathic listening is not that you agree with someone; it’s that you fully, deeply, understand that person, emotionally as well as intellectually. (p240)

My own listening skills aren’t always what I’d like them to be. It’s extremely easy to become overwhelmed with the day to day. Most people tend to respond to this by tuning out a great deal of what’s going on around them in order to get the most urgent things done. Unfortunately, we also tend to tune out some of the most important things in our lives.

As an example, how many parents ahve gotten fed up with a nagging, whining child and told him or her to “go away” or “do it because I said so?” I think we’ve all done this from time to time without even thinking. Sure we feel bad about it later, but our parents reacted the same way with us, didn’t they?

I’ve found that taking a moment to look my child in the eye and really listen can sometimes short circuit the nagging and whining almost immediately. Often, their discontent is based on a feeling that they aren’t being heard. It’s amazing how well children respond when an adult treats them like a person, not as another adult, but as a person, an individual with a unique perspective and his or her own needs and desires.

Children aren’t the only ones who can benefit from this attention, either. Every interaction we have on a daily basis could be enhanced in some way by raising the level of our communication. This doesn’t have to be a heart to heart chat with the bank teller, but more of an intention to really try to understand where the people we encounter every day are coming from.

The Lifehacks posting is a nice, quick guide to trying this out in your cmmunications. For a more in-depth discussion, I definitely recommend the The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

Tags: 7 Habits productivity lifehacks communication skills