Goal Progression - Being Productive.

Recently there have been 3 main goals which I have been personally working to achieve this past month. Goals which have been serving my productivity in astounding ways. Within this post I will explain what exactly these goals are, and then I'll illustrate how I have been following through in order to achieve them. After which I will express the benefits I have been experiencing from attempting these. Hopefully, by sharing this information with you guys I will be able to encourage and impel those who read it to come up will goals of your own and follow through with them.

1. Becoming an early riser.

Since moving into my new apartment I've been forcing myself to wake up at 6 am every morning. I've been doing this for many reasons. The first being that I hadn't been feeling very productive these past few, well, years if I'm being honest. I used to wake up at whatever time I wanted and then do whatever I wanted without much thought or intent. However, since watching, reading and listening to a lot of The Minimalists YouTube content, books, and podcasts I have been attempting to live A LOT more intentionally. This includes being more intentional with the things I spend my days doing and how I spend my hours living. So, I started waking up earlier in order to have more time in the day to be more deliberate with my tasks, goals and to be all round more productive, rather than wasting my precious time by sleeping in.

Another reason why I began waking up at 6 am was the fact that I have been trying to be live a more natural, healthier, simpler life. Something that has been considered to be healthy, natural even, for the past few decades is waking up early. As the famous Benjamin Franklin quote goes - "Early to bed, Early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise." Not to mention the numerous amounts of research about how making up early is healthy for our bodies - which prove that Benjamin Franklin was very much correct. Take this article for example called Early Risers get Ahead of the Game where Dr Joerg Huber of Roehampton University stated that "there are morning people and evening people, and morning people tend to be healthier and happier, as well as having lower body mass indices." His reasoning was that people who tend to wake up early are capable of getting the necessary chores out of the way early on in the day allowing them to be less stressed throughout the day. He also added that stressing less, meant that there was less chances of stress eating which has several disadvantages and negative effects on the body all on its own.

In order to achieve this goal, I have been setting a 6 am alarm every morning and have removed the snooze feature from the alarm in order to avoid the temptation. I tend to put a book, that I plan on reading the next morning, on my bedside table as right before bed as encouragement, this to me is a form of reward to myself for waking up early. If you are someone who is attempting or interested in waking up early but are struggling, I suggest finding something to prompt you and excite you to actually get up (E.g. like a good book). And for those book worms out there reading this post - I'm currently reading War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells.

2. Becoming a Minimalist.

Since having watched The Minimalists movie on Netflix I was inspired to not only live more intentionally, but to also live with less. Reason being, I have always be somewhat of a hoarder. I have held on to my childhood memories, projects to one day complete, items, toys, and trinkets which are hardly ever used, if ever. Just a lot of things which I did not have the necessity nor did it bring me joy as often as I hoped when I first got it. The point being, I wanted less things. I have always been the type of person to stress plenty and often, and having taken upon myself the minimalist philosophy that a less cluttered home has less visual distractions, meaning less visual stress, I wanted to remove the extra unnecessary stress occupying my environment. Not to mention the fact that extra clutter means extra cleaning which takes time away for more important activities. Plus, I just adore the minimalist aesthetics and lifestyle and I wanted in on it.

When I first started, I decluttered as much as I possibly could - all the things I knew I wouldn't want or need, all the things that no longer bought me any joy, all the things I knew just weren't me anymore. Then when it started to get tougher, such as decluttering things that used to belong to my childhood or that I thought I may one day need I adopted Joshua Fields Millburn's practice that if I found myself using the sentence "I may one day need this" or "this may come in handy some day" then I would immediately get rid of it. For all I know that one day may never come and it is wasting space being in my environment so why bother keeping it when I can give it to someone who may actually have use for it. Furthermore, if the time comes and I do in fact need it then I can just replace it with a quick and easy Amazon search.

Currently, I tend to try and go through my possessions at least once every two weeks making sure that all I own I still have a need for or that it still serves me purpose. I feel as though I will continue to go through this until I am at a place where I feel satisfied with the clearance. I am also ONLY allowing myself to purchase things that I NEED and try my best to avoid buying anything else. It helps that I have finally moved out of my parents house and in with my partner as I don't really have a choice but to be wise with my money. In a sense, moving out has given me the motive that I needed to be wiser with my money. And minimalism has given me the motive I need to be wiser and more intent with my time.

3. Becoming more consistent with my website and YouTube.

I've decided that every Sunday is post day. I say Sunday's because I work Monday through to Friday and weekends is all I have. I've been writing what I can throughout my early mornings during the week, which then gives me Saturday's to edit. This has been my flow since first moving into my apartment at the end of August. The only problem being that my job is pretty energetic which requires me to have to always be up and ready and moving. So, by the time I get home from work I'm exhausted, and despite loving being The List Girl and writing or doing video stuff for my channel, and despite being very much committed to my bucket list and being an influencer, I regularly feel like just spending my weekends resting and playing video games on the sofa.

In order to avoid doing this every weekend (I'll admit that I treated myself to some PS3 and TLC this past weekend, but I had uploaded my video on time so I didn't feel so bad about relaxing) I tend to remind myself that this is what I want to do, and if I want to get to the stage where I can be self employed and doing videography and writing on the daily for myself then I need to be consistent and put in the work now. This way I'll have more time to relax later. I wouldn't necessarily say this was the easiest way to get things done but it's been working so far, and I have been more consistent than I was back when I was at University which makes me extremely happy as I have more time to do more List Girl things. And despite it requiring heavy amounts of effort on my part throughout the weeks I have been genuinely enjoying it, and it has helped me feel a million times more productive than I used to.

In summary, in order to be able to feel as productive as I have been recently I've had to seriously rethink and change a few of my previous habits and condition myself to be more purposeful with the way I use my time. For so long I have felt like I have merely been wasting my time with useless and petty activities, and swapping from different degree to different degree and I have gotten to the point where I no longer want to waste any more of my time on this earth mindlessly and start living more intentionally.

Reference:

• Early Risers get Ahead of the Game (2011) by Nick Collins - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/8763618/Early-risers-get-ahead-of-the-game.html