5 Healthy Habits To Be More Productive: Part 01
Living a peacefully productive life means working toward your dreams and goals while prioritizing your mental health and the important relationships in your life. In order to do that you have to have a solid mindset, be clear on your vision, know your priorities, and live your day-to-day life in a way that reflects your vision and priorities.
Over the last few years, I’ve really honed in on habits that help me get out of that overwhelmed way of living and I’m here to share them with you today!
01. Having regular check-in meetings
If you’ve been around for a while, you’re probably familiar with the Hustle Sanely Habits. But just in case:
A Yearly Vision Meeting
Quarterly Check-in Meetings
Monthly Check-in Meetings
Weekly Prep Meetings
3 Daily Habits: Morning routine, evening routine, and Hustle Sanely 5 (to make sure you’re showing up and making progress on your goals while prioritizing your mental health and relationships)
They’re basically pre-scheduled times built into your life that help you audit your goals and routines and to create action plans to work toward these things in a healthy way. Having these check-in meetings built into my life holds me accountable to living with intention and not getting stuck in just going through the motions. Thanks to these meetings, I’m able to pick up on unhealthy patterns in my life before they become habitual so I can make changes and be sure that I’m showing up for my life how I want to be showing up. Plus, I actually make consistent and sustainable progress on the goals that I set.
I also have an e-book called, The Hustle Sanely Handbook where I introduce each one of these in detail so if you really want to learn how to integrate these into your life, check it out.
If you’re new to Hustling Sanely, implementing these different check-in meetings into your life is a great place to start creating your peacefully productive life. They really do set you up to take ownership of your life….no more of “life happening to you” if you know what I mean.
02. Taking a mid-day break to reset
If that break involves sunshine and/or fresh air. So most of you know that I work from home. I also consider myself a recovering workaholic. I used to either skip my mid-day lunch break altogether or take 5 minutes to scarf down a protein bar before rushing back to my laptop and to-do list. Honestly, even when I worked out of the home, I tended to skip my lunch breaks in favor of working lunches aka I’d stay glued to my computer and eat a sad soggy sandwich while I kept pecking away at emails or whatever. I cringe thinking about those days because now I get so stoked for my daily mid-day reset.
Benefits of a mid-day break to reset:
⋒ Helps beat the afternoon slump/brain fog that sets in mid-afternoon for a lot of people. When I take a mid-day break, I am almost always more productive the second half of the work day. And by more productive, I mean I’m more focused and do better quality work.
⋒ Gives you the opportunity to shake off anything that you don’t want to carry into the second half of your day that may gave happened in the morning.
⋒ It’s good for your mental health and helps prevent burnout.
Your mid-day break will look different depending on what your work day looks like but don’t focus on what you aren’t able to do during your mid-day break. Instead, focus on what you are able to do. So let’s say you work at a school and aren’t able to leave campus during your lunch break – instead, spend 15 minutes eating your lunch while you read on your Kindle and then do a 5-minute stretch video after you eat.
Other ideas for your mid-day break:
⋒ Eat your lunch without scrolling on your phone
⋒ Go on a prayer walk
⋒ Do a guided meditation
⋒ Sit in the sunshine and read 10 pages of a book
⋒ Sit in the sunshine and practice hand lettering for 10 minutes
⋒ Weed your garden
⋒ Go grab a coffee from your favorite local coffee shop
⋒ Pop in your headphones and listen to a podcast while you walk on the treadmill
Again, your break will look different than anyone else’s. Just think about how much time you have available and what kinds of things make you feel refreshed. A mid-day break can be 5 minutes or it can be an hour – it’s more about the intention behind what you’re doing than how much time you spend doing it.
03. Using Hustle Sanely 5™ daily
DUH. You probably saw this one coming but I don’t even care – I’m still gonna talk about it, lol. If you’re new here, allow me to introduce you to the best productivity tool on the planet: Hustle Sanely 5™ or HS5. HS5 is a list of 5 intentional habits that the Hustle Sanely community does every day to help us work toward our goals while prioritizing our mental health and relationships.
The 5 habits that makeup HS5 are:
⋒ Complete your Focus 3 tasks
⋒ Move for 30 minutes
⋒ Tidy for 15 minutes
⋒ Say or do one kind thing for yourself
⋒ Say or do one kind thing for someone else
If you follow me on Instagram, you know that I share my daily HS5 a few times a week because it’s legit the daily tool that helps me live a peacefully productive life. The cool thing is, that HS5 is built into most of our planning tools!
04. Building rest into your schedule
One of the biggest changes that I made in 2022 is dedicating a day a week to resting. A day where I don’t have a to-do list and I focus on being instead of doing. I used to think that I had to earn rest. Once my weekly to-do list was done then I could spend the last 30 minutes of Sunday night relaxing. What sad times I was living in, lol.
Now I know that we don’t earn rest and that the truth is, when we operate from a place of rest, we actually end up accomplishing so much more because we aren’t constantly in this grind cycle of hustling. These days, and what I teach y’all to do, is build rest into your schedule. Don’t wait for rest to find you because it won’t. Schedule it in just like you would a meeting or appointment. Rest is whatever refreshes you. Maybe it’s getting brunch with your girlfriends. Or spending Saturday morning perusing the aisles of HomeGoods with Starbucks in your hand alone. Or going paddleboarding with your partner. I’ve come such a long way when it comes to rest, seriously, and I am a different human because of it. I’m a better wife, business owner, friend, and I know it’ll make me a better mom, too. I used to work 60+ hours a week and now I work around 25-30 hours a week and get just as much and sometimes more done than when I worked all those hours because I’m better quality when I’m operating from a place of rest.
If rest is something you need help with, we have a whole podcast episode about it and we also did a whole training on Creating Real Rhythms of Rest in Your Life that you can work through.
05. Journaling in the morning and at night
Bookending my day with journaling helps me to take ownership of my mindset. Journaling helps me to “clear my mental pipes” if you will, which allows me to focus better on tasks that I’m doing throughout the day. Then at night, I usually sleep better when I journal because I’m not dealing with racing thoughts as I’m trying to fall asleep. When you have tons of thoughts rolling all over your mind it can be easy to feel like you’re playing an intense game of ping pong with them all day and not really able to get things done or be present. Journaling is a tool that I use to help me process my thoughts so that they don’t keep me feeling stuck in my own mind. It allows me to be more productive and more present in my own life.
If you’re new to journaling, I highly recommend grabbing a guided journal –check out the Hustle Sanely® Peacefully Productive Journal™ because it really is a tool that I’m incredibly proud of creating.
If you found this blog post helpful and you would like to listen to the full podcast episode, tune in below!
