How to make your day a success

Are you in a bad state of mind or stuck in a rut? Do you feel like all your goals become more and more unattainable? Do you want to think longterm, but aren't even able to plan your day? If this sounds like something you're going through, maybe these steps will help you.

1. Do all the necessary things
You're a biological being. Your body has needs. Start to respect them.

Plan some daily physical activity. Even a fifteen minute afternoon walk is better than nothing.
Work on your nutrition. Cutting sugary snacks and white carbohydrates is a first good step. Centre your food around vegetables and legumes.
Get enough sleep. Schedule eight to nine hours for it. Turn off your PC and smartphone 90 minutes before you go to sleep. Spend the rest of the evening doing activities that don't require looking at a screen.

2. Become intentional about your time
Think about one thing you can do today that makes everything else easier or unnecessary. Schedule as much time as possible for it. An uninterrupted block of 2-4h is best, but use what you have. For the rest of your day, use time blocking and compartmentalisation. Each morning, take a few minutes to think about how you want to spend your free time. Split your time in 30min blocks and assign each block an activity you want to do. The goal isn't to schedule more work for the evening, but to become intentional with how you want to spend your time. It's perfectly fine to schedule watching Youtube or playing video games.

3. Train yourself to get started
Sometimes, especially when the day was tough, it's easy to fall back into old patterns. What you planned to do earlier suddenly feels undoable. First, take a note of this in your daily planner to develop a better handle on your energy levels throughout the day. Then, start to do what you planned to do for 30 minutes, but do it for just two. Sometimes all you need to do is to get started. If you realise after two minutes that it's still hard, stop doing it. It's fine. It doesn't matter how much you're getting done today. What's important is to develop the habit of getting started. In fact, a good rule of thumb is to do less than you think you can do. This will keep up your motivation and stop you from overworking.

4. Have a high-value fallback activity
Let's assume you have done what you wanted to do for two minutes, and still feel too tired to do anything else. If you want to prevent to fall back to your default activity of wasting time, think about an activity that requires the same amount of energy as what you want to stop doing, but has a higher value. For example, if you want to stop random surfing on Youtube, but want to listen to more music, start to maintain a list of albums. Now is the best time to pick one of them and listen to it. Doing this will make sure that you'll have a better time even in your moments of least self-control.