What single change in your daily routine had the biggest impact in your life?

Doing a series of pushups every day.

I started this discipline to lose weight.

I didn’t. In fact, I was gaining pounds each year. Nonetheless my fitness performace increased significantly and I learned the value of perseverance.

Before my life transformation, a good chunk of my personal philosophy was the belief that not much depends on my actions. I was afraid that my efforts to get more out of life would be in vain. I would work my ass off just to get exhausted. My dreams couldn’t come true.

Reading The Slight Edge I reminded myself of the instances where I did something consistently and got the results. It wasn’t a massive action, but it was focused and stretched over a long period of time.

I did one series of pushups every day for a few years and I extended my limits. I was eventually able to do more than 120 consecutive pushups.

This realization has shaken my small world

Something clicked in my head. My personal philosophy shifted into “time plus effort equals results.”

I developed tiny disciplines, which I practiced consistently: tracking my expenses, tracking my calorie intake, writing, speed-reading. I observed some results almost immediately.
Within a month, I was reading almost 50 percent faster.
In seven months, I reached my dream weight.
Those rapid results kept me going with the disciplines I couldn’t have believed would have ever brought me results.

What Changes have made the biggest impact in my life? I’ve had added a few over just the last 1.5 years that have proven worthy of integrating into your day.

When I found myself in a depressed state last year I seeked out many therapies and research hard to find out what the most happiest and successful people’s day looks like.

Here is what has worked for me. These are all very practical explanations that I will present in order of how your day unfolds.

The First 60 minutes of the day - This is where you set the tone. You really can’t make it worse but you can certainly improve the likelihood of your day going positively. This time should be your time, no matter what happens today, no matter how much of yourself you give to your work, your team, your family, you’ll be able to look back and say, “well, I had that for myself.” You know you won’t get that time after work, when you have to go to the gym, spend time with the family, make dinner and settle down.

What should you do in this time? I have a few ideas, but if you practice nothing else in this time, practice gratitude. Look around, look where you are right now, think about the people in your life, where you live, how lucky you are to be born at this time in history, in one of only a few countries where you can do anything you want.

Think about the things you have done, the things you have earned (yes, even material things) and the timing of how things have come together to bring you to this moment, where you can simply reflect on it. Be thankful for all this.

Even if you live in this crappiest apartment in the crappiest part of town, find something to be thankful for, it may be dandelion growing through a crack in the concrete below your apartment. That dandelion is there, against all odds, and you and it get to have this moment together in it’s brief lifespan. You could have been born anything, be thankful you aren’t a single celled microbe without a conscious.

Practicing gratitude has had a profound effect on my perspective. I was in a very dark place, I had a lot to be thankful for but I couldn’t even see it, and I still occasionally get tested by these thoughts, but I find that gratitude is the antidote. It’s like a muscle, if you exercise it regularly, it will become stronger, more coordinated and more efficient. You can literally switch your default state of mind permanently.

What else can you do in this time?

Read - The person you will be in five years is a combination of the books you read, the people you meet, and the experiences you’ve had. Block out 15–30 minutes of the time and read a chapter of something in the personal development/self-help category. Right now I take my dog for a walk and listen to about 30 minutes of audio book. Currently I am listening to Stephen Pressfield’s The War of Art.

Breathe - There are numerous breathing methods out there, the two I like most are The Wim Hof Breathing Method and Box Breathing. This is an amazing way to manipulate the chemicals in your brain to focus you and put you in the moment. The Wim Hof Method can put you into an almost meditative state that can bring subconscious thought to the surface.

I have a YouTube video I did on the Wim Hof Method that makes it easy to practice and explains the benefits, it’s got over 30,000 views, people seem to really enjoy it.

Practicing calming your mind is just like practicing gratitude, you get better at it with practice. Being able to harness your thoughts at the start of the day will set the tone for the rest of the day. You’ll be less likely to get derailed or distracted by the many things grasping for our attention.

You get more work done at a higher quality by batching. With batching you set a timer to only focus on one specific task at time until you’ve reached completion or a specific milestone, in that time you turn off all notifications and you do not let people derail you. By some over-ear headphones and put them on, even if you don’t play music people will assume you cannot hear them and are less likely to even bother trying to get your attention.

Set up an autoresponder in your email accounts that says specifically what time you check your email and will reply to them. If you have to be on Facebook to run ads or communicate on a specific project with a group or person then get a feed blocker extension for your browser (chrome has a couple). Set up autoresponders in your FB messages that say specifically when you will get back to them. This is something I got from reading Tim Ferriss’s Four Hour Work Week.

Do the same with emails and messages, instead of doing them one by one and always letting them derail your focus, just have a specific time each day that you check all your emails and be done with it.

You will be surprised at how much high quality work you will produce in a given time period by batching. I actually do it with my quora posts, it’s how I practice writing. Every night I find one question and focus exclusively on it. I dedicate myself to it and deliver the very best, most thought out answer I can.

Lastly, and I’ll keep this one short because it’s been talked about in other posts. Exercise. At 5:30p every day, except Thursdays and Sundays, I drop everything and get my workout in. Just like the start of the day, this is for me. I do CrossFit, and I actually own a CrossFit gym here in Phoenix. I’m not going to tell you what to do, just find something that moves you and do it.