Plan tomorrow tonight. 3 ways to always make your day productive and happy!

When you sleep your subconscious is active (mainly during REM sleep), your mind is relaxed and isn’t clouded with noisy ‘awake’ thoughts. Ideas and affirmations are solidified in your mind. The strange thing is that you aren’t consciously aware of this the next day, it’s just a standard day, but everything seems to go smoothly, you’re spontaneous, efficient, happy and you can focus on your goals easier. Sleep is also a great problem solver, so use it to your advantage.

Plan to plan. Whatever your nightly routine is, try to plan 10 minutes just before you put your head on the pillow, if you spend a bit of time in bed before you actually sleep – reading books, watching television etc – you could use this 10 mins while still in bed.

Visualise. Use the power of your imagination to see what tomorrow will be like, pretend that you are living tomorrow wherever you will be, see yourself how you want to see yourself, making great decisions and results at work, feeling happy etc.

Write. Jot down your goals for tomorrow on a pad (handy to always keep one on the bedside table). When you write something down it’s more concrete than you expect, even if you throw the paper away, it stays in your subconscious. If it’s an objective then your subconscious sees it as such and starts working out solutions and paths to such a goal.

Remember to start small with your plans, just plan to have simple things happen throughout the next day, after a while you’ll get better at planning and start to advance to bigger and better things!

3 Simple Ways to Make Goal Setting Effective

Goal Setting really is the secret to success, once you get over the hurdle of initially thinking of what you want to do in life thoughts and ideas flow freely.

1. Just Do It. I always used to procrastinate with my goals. “It’s ok, the goals are in my head” or “What if I don’t achieve my set goals?”. Before you start making excuses for yourself, just start writing stuff down. Your first one or two may seem a bit stupid, but you will get better at writing your goals after a while.

2. Review your goals everyday. One of the worst things you can do with goal setting is write them once and forget about them. If the goals are out of your mind you will find it hard to achieve them, obviously. When I started goal setting, I used to write the headings of my goals out on a bit of scrap paper, eg. Better Paying Job
or Make $50000 Cash. This is an excellent way to keep focused, the goals can be written on anything, a napkin, whiteboard, back of an envelope etc. The best thing is that you don’t need to keep what you have written, you can throw it away afterwards!

The idea behind this is that every time you write those goals, your awareness is shifting to thoughts on how you can achieve the goals and you are effectively brainstorming solutions for those goals.

3. Take action! Obviously if you just write “Win $5 Million in the lottery” and never go and buy a ticket you will have a 0% chance of actually winning the lottery. The same applies to your standard goal setting. Identify your goals and really work for them, eg. If I were to have “Higher Income” for a goal, I obviously would be looking around for opportunities to do so, be it a raise, another job or an investment.

Set your goals in concrete, but make your path in sand.