Use this 20-minute morning routine to feel great and perform at your very best. — If you want to start a morning routine, you can find a lot of advice online. And while most of it is pretty good, almost all of the recommended routines have one major flaw. They assume that you have a lot of time available every morning. That’s just not the…

Get in the box, and you’ll get the job done. — In 1957, Jimmy Greaves signed a contract with Chelsea FC and began his career as a professional soccer player. He made his debut at just 17 years old and immediately scored his first goal. Four seasons later, when Greaves left Chelsea, he had scored 124 goals for the club. Then…

Use Deliberate Consequences to eliminate unwanted behaviors. — When entrepreneur Thomas Frank decided to start waking up early every morning, he invented a clever strategy to force himself out of bed. In his work, he uses a social media app called Buffer to prepare tweets and messages to Facebook and LinkedIn ahead of time. It’s a great tool…

Use Replacement Habits to better cope with stress and boredom. — If you examine bad habits closely, you’ll find that they’re almost always caused by two things: stress and boredom. Consider, for instance, the following list of common bad habits: Biting your nails Smoking cigarettes Excessive shopping Drinking too much Browsing social media Eating junk food Wasting time on your phone …

Use ‘Urge Surfing’ to let cravings come and go without getting swept away by them. — Your environment affects your behavior in a big way. So, if you want to change a bad habit, it’s usually a good practice to remove everything that triggers it from your environment. But what if the trigger is internal? What if a thought, feeling, or impulse keeps initiating the behavior? …

Use Einstein’s Razor to focus your time, energy, and attention on what’s essential. — Albert Einstein once said: Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. This preference for simplicity shows in his famous equation E=MC2. Rather than settling for a complex, lengthy equation, Einstein boiled it down to its bare minimum. And this approach is applicable well beyond scientific theories…

Use The Fogg Behavior Model to easily create the change you want. — BJ Fogg is one of the world’s leading experts in behavior change. He has created The Fogg Behavior Model, which is a handy framework for building habits. According to the model, a behavior happens when three elements converge at the same moment: A prompt — You have to remember to…

Establish a daily Hermit Hour. — Cal Newport is a computer science professor and the author of several books. He’s famous for his remarkable productivity, both as a researcher and writer. According to Newport, you can do two types of work: Shallow work is non-demanding, logistical-style tasks that you usually do while you’re distracted. This kind…

Always begin with a Shitty First Draft. — In her book, Bird by Bird, author Anne Lamott introduces the concept of “shitty first drafts”: All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. Most people assume that great authors write quickly and effortlessly. …