Being successful is something that everyone wants to achieve. However, the way how you become more successful is more important than the result itself. Your skills need to be maintained, polished and practised. With a little discipline, using the following tips, being more successful could be eventually effortless and part of your daily routine.

Reflection

When the evening comes, we start the evening routine of my baby son. After the dinner and bath, I go to the bedroom with him in my arms and walk around in the dark room until he goes asleep. This 15-20 minute gives me the opportunity to look back to the last day a bit. I have time to relax and think about what happened today.

What decisions I made, what went well and what are the areas I can improve further? Thinking about these questions you can identify patterns in your decision-making process or communication style. If you have old habits that you cannot see from the inside and are standing in your way to be more successful, you can analyse and change them.

Acknowledging your weak points is the first, but crucial step towards making them your strengths. Next time when you see the same pattern coming up in a situation, you can immediately stop yourself and say: ‘Whoa, hey. I am about to use the old habits now, and this is not the best thing I can do in this case’. It is the moment when you can decide to step back and change your style.

Reflection on the day’s events is also useful to keep a record of your conscious choices, and you can focus more on them tomorrow.

Top 3 priority tasks for tomorrow

Regarding tomorrow, you can use your reflection time to identify the three most important things you want to tackle by the end of the next day. Get a sticky note, write down the top 3 urgent and essential items on your to-do list.

If you have a nice pile of tasks and you wonder where to start, you can utilise Eisenhower’s Urgent/Important Principle. He realised that in many cases focus can be shifted and one can miss opportunities because people do not know whether urgent is essential as well or not - and vice versa.

He said that excellent time management is not just useful, efficient as well. He created four categories of tasks:

·       Important and urgent

·       Important and less urgent

·       Less important and urgent

·       Less important and less urgent

Elements in the first group can be tricky. If you procrastinate important but not urgent tasks, they can quickly become urgent and then these will put pressure on your shoulders. Scheduling your tasks and planning could help a lot, but if you have many important and urgent tasks, start with the top ones and tackle them one by one. Leave some time free for the unknown things in this category.

Which is the top priority task? It does not matter. If you start tackling them in the order, you wrote them down is more than enough. The point is to start tackling them.

Longer term tasks, personal or career objectives can be important, but these are not urgent all the time. Your professional development is naturally important. It is always better to leave some time for learning and polishing your skills because if you are not improving, you are losing competitive ground.

Delegate as much as you can from the not essential categories, because these are standing in your way and while these are not important, the benefit can be meagre. Especially the not crucial and not urgent tasks. These are a pure distraction, so you should avoid them.

Continuous learning

Also, the most successful people are continuous learners. Imagine a writer who is not reading enough. Her limits will be visible immediately in her language, style, and her books will be boring because of the limited view of the world.

When I put my son to his bed and stay with him for a while in the dark, I take my phone, start Flipboard and LinkedIn to go through the best articles about leadership, influence and many more useful topics which can help me be better in my job – and in my private life.

Even if you read only 4-5 articles or an hour per day, you can learn new ways of thinking and act every day. Point out an idea or an action or a tip you will start practising from the next day. Observing yourself and making small or significant amendments can help you get used to the changes, push forward and remain positive.

Any small changes will be visible almost immediately, and you can collect feedbacks continuously to measure the success of the change. Making it a habit will help you accommodate and handle changes and try out new ways with high confidence without fear of failure. It is life, we fail from time to time, but the ability to leave your comfort zone quickly will boost your productivity and success.