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Success is a marathon, not a sprint. You’ve no doubt heard this before. Does this mean that there isn’t anything small you can force yourself into doing today that’ll produce HUGE results in the long-term? Of course not.
While getting into the habit of lifting weights three times a week may require the exertion of willpower over a long period of time to become a habit, there are other habits that aren’t so difficult to form. To change our lives most dramatically in a short period of time, it can be beneficial to focus on these quick wins.
Here are a few simple shifts you can make in your life increase the likelihood you’ll both attain great success AND maintain it over a long period of time.
#1 Place your alarm on the other side of the room.
This small change does two things. First, it prevents you from accidentally turning your alarm off in a half dazed state in the morning. When you sleep in arm’s length of your phone, it’s only a matter of time until an exhausted you unconsciously shuts off the alarm in the morning.
Don’t do it. Being late to your job, or missing a client call is stressful. Place your alarm on the other side of the room, and it becomes almost impossible to sleep through it or accidentally turn it off.
The other benefit of putting your alarm on the other side of the room is that it forces you out of bed. We’ve all woken up from our alarms and spent a lazy 30 minutes or more wasting time on Facebook.
Fortunately, once you’ve gotten out of bed, and did a little walking, you’re significantly less likely to feel lazy versus if you’d stayed in bed the whole time.
#2 Keep your phone in airplane mode
First, I recognize that not everyone can afford to go “off the grid” for days, or even several hours at a time. It is important to recognize, however, that cell phones are extraordinarily distracting.
Just about everyone knows by now that it’s impossible for the brain to effectively multitask. It goes even further though. Research shows that just having your phone within an arm’s reach from you can significantly reduce your ability to focus!
For most of us, it’s not practical to leave our phone at home every time we’d like to concentrate. By turning your phone on airplane mode, however, you can greatly reduce the amount of distractions your phone brings.
The small inconvenience of having to switch off airplane mode and reconnect to wifi or your cellular data connection can also help reduce the temptations you feel to engage in time wasting activities on your phone.
#3 Disable push notifications
Keeping your phone or even enabling airplane mode is too extreme for you? Fair enough. Disabling the majority of, if not all of one’s push notifications is something everyone can do.
There is no reason you need to receive a notification every single time somebody likes one of your Instagram pictures or challenges you to a fight on some game. Disabling push notifications on your phone goes a long way towards disabling the distractions that lead you to living a mediocre life.
#4 Purchase a water filter
Unless you’re an advanced AI bot reading this in the future, you’re probably drinking a lot of water. Unfortunately, most people are drinking impure water. I’m not even talking about the poor villagers who are drinking dirty bacteria infested water in the poor corners of the world.
Even if you’re in the USA, or another developed country that claims to have safe tap water, you’re likely drinking water that isn’t exactly “pure”. You can do research on this independently to verify my claim.
If you take my word for it, however, just know that regularly drinking filtered water is a simple, yet significant win for your health when the effects are compounded over several years.
#5 Purchase a better mattress
You’re not going to perform at your best if you’re tired all the time. Poor mattresses contribute significantly to poor quality sleep. Bare minimum, sleeping on a low quality surface is going to force you to stay in bed a longer time to feel energized.
In short, whether it leads to more energy or time, setting yourself up with a nice mattress will help you sustain a successful lifestyle in the long-term.
#6 One-in-one-out policy
Suffer from clutter? You’re not alone. It’s a problem almost everyone deals this. A simple fix to combat accumulating too many things is forcing yourself to get rid of something each time you make a new purchase.
Purchased a new shirt? Fine, but force yourself to donate or rummage off one of your old shirts before allowing yourself to hang up the new shirt.
Of course, it’s easy to forget to throw something away from time to time. For that reason, I recommend you adopt the One-In-Two-Out policy. Each time you buy something new, you have to force yourself to throw out two things.
This strategy is even more effective than the previous because you’ll feel less inclined to buy something if you know you need to get rid of two things first. Of course, kissing two possessions goodbye every time you purchase something new also means that you’ll be able to gradually reduce the clutter in your life over time too!
#7 Cancel unnecessary subscriptions
When you subscribe to something and don’t use it, you’re wasting money. This is obvious. Unfortunately, most of us are living go-go-go lifestyles at a frantic speed. Most of us fail to take time on occasion to ask what subscriptions we are no longer using.
If you’re on a sabbatical from work to take care of a newborn baby, it may make sense to cancel that coworking space membership. Similarly, if you have a serious injury and won’t be able to exercise for six months, it’s worth canceling that gym membership.
Along with cancelling services we no longer use, it can also be beneficial to look at the subscriptions we have that don’t serve us in living up to our highest ideals. If you believe that porn is detrimental, for example, it would obviously be beneficial to cancel that porn site subscription.
Conclusion
Quick wins can help motivate you to continue taking more and more action in your life. Take action on a few of these quick wins and you’ll gain the momentum needed to make significant changes in every area of your life.