Since the early ages of the civilization, people have understood what is important about mornings. During these times, waking up in the early morning can be powerful and boost your productivity and create a sense of personal contentment and focus you may not achieve otherwise. Our ancient texts have explained the significance of waking up early. This is best time to get up to achieve divine strength, knowledge, wisdom and good health.

Rising with the sun, or before, has been something that people have done for centuries. In Hindu religion, there is a specific time to do everything. But now, for many of us, mornings still suck.

How can we pack in more productivity and return to the ways of those who got so much real work done, and apply what they knew about themselves and the world to the way we do our work today?

Here are some pointers that can you get started:

1 | Get Enough Sleep

Think about how one bad night’s sleep, or not enough sleep, makes you feel the next day. For many of us, we’re grumpy and irritable, we find it difficult to concentrate, and we have no energy. We can overreact when things don’t go our way, and we may find we’re less excited if something good happens. So it is easy to see how ongoing sleeplessness can be a worry. Long term sleep deficiency can increase the risk of chronic health problems such as heart disease and diabetes. It can also significantly affect your mood. Sleeplessness and mood disorders are closely linked. And it can work both ways – sleep loss can affect your mood, and your mood can affect how much and how well you sleep. So getting enough sleep and the right kind of sleep is important.

2 | Leverage Your Mornings

The time just before dawn contains the most energy of all hours of the day. This has helped me become an early riser and an early doer. This is the Power Hour, dedicated to meditation, affirmations, visualization, exercise, reading and journaling. This is not the time for emails and To-Do lists. Having this structure in the morning will radicalized the following days.

“Ordinary people think merely of spending time; great people think of using it.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

 3| Optimize Your Night Before

Swami Vivekananda said, “Fill the brain with high thoughts, highest ideals, place them day and night before you, and out of that will come great work.” This is another powerful keystone habit that can turn your morning after around, and take your day to the next level. This preps your mind to stay focused on your goals and help you get better prepped to finish what you have set out to do during the day.

 4 | Drink Warm Water

You need to do something about it immediately after you wake up. Water helps you to breathe, think, lose weight, wake up, regulate your body temperature, and be productive. Drink a glass of luke warm water. You may add a dash of lime, that’s it. This will regulate your body and enable you to manage your weight better as well.

Note: Be sure to add dates and jaggery in your lunch later in the day, as warm lime water taken regularly boosts weight loss, but has been known to reduce your blood count in some people.

5 | Exercise

Exercise is the keystone habit it can be in your life. Such a habit will help you to create and maintain more habits with greater efficiency and effectiveness. Working out/exercising in the morning serves this purpose because of how it gets your body started for the day. Exercise is productive in and of itself, but it can also help you to continue to be productive further along into your morning. Not only does exercising help you to eat better, though. Exercise can help you to build momentum for further harder tasks in the day, inspire you to drink more water, and therefore help your brain to work more efficiently, and more.

6 | Wake Up At The Same Time

Be intentional with the time you wake up. One of the key tenants of the lives of the most productive people on the planet is consistency. Pick a time that you can wake up on at a regular basis. This will help you go to bed on time every night, and to wake up knowing what time it will be, what the sun outside will look like, and more.

Make waking up less of a painful thing — make it something that marks the beginning of a new, incredible, productive day. Be consistent, and build the habit of waking up at the time you want, all of the time.

7 | Track Your Habits

Once you have streamlines you wake up hour and exercise routine, the last 4 habits will easily roll in place. This way, there’s no question of what you are supposed to be doing and you will look forward to the it. You will get the satisfaction and dopamine boosts from filling out the tracker with my progress and mini-accomplishments.

Make sure that you track your behavior in the morning — that way you get both the satisfaction of checking the boxes, and the awareness of when you’re falling behind on some of your most crucial habits. This habit will be the game-changer for you before 7 am.

 8 | Focus On Big Challenges

Put the most important or crucial task that you may have been putting off and break it up in smaller tasks. This will give you the most satisfaction from completing. Take on your “big task” in the morning. It will get you ready for every other big and great thing you have before you in your day. Best way to keep your morning and your day productive? Start it that way.

9| Create SMART Goals

Finally, coming to the last, but SMART tip that was explained very well in an article on Online portal, Medium, “Most AM rituals require 2–4 hours to complete and many of us can get frustrated with being unable to stick to your goals in the long run. The solution is to create SMART Morning Routine that can be completed in a little as 30 minutes and still provide the majority of benefits of longer rituals. The acronym S-M-A-R-T stands for “specific/simple, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. A SMART Morning Routine involves starting the day with as little as 30 minutes of time designed to take your productivity to the next level. Abraham Lincoln’s advised, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I’ll spend the first four sharpening my axe.”

How can you implement this habit? First, you ‘prime’ your body, mind, and soul by using a series of breathing exercises, which can be any fitness activity of your choosing, like speed walking or jogging on the spot or event Surya Namaskar. Then identify and focus on your own specific goals for the day— your 3 most important goals — visualizing yourself actively working on AND successfully completing each of them.

By taking just about 30 minutes and completing your important goals, the SMART Morning Routine leaves you a ‘complete’ person, eager to attack the day because you have already completed a few tasks that made you feel great AND you have a clear-eyed vision on what you want to do. Thus you can immediately move forward — already in a highly productive mindset. You feel like you are already a success and that confidence is half the battle to a winning the day.

So get started with these practical tips. You may shuffle and re-invent the tips based on your preferences and convenience, but try them and see how well your mornings go. Do share your feedback on compassionmag@gmail.com.