Sometimes I ask myself, why should I need a productive day like some successful people trying to have? Is it not great to have cozy and lazy day, just simply enjoying the sunrise and sunset the whole day? It was a great day for me before I experienced the day that I’ve done so many works and things to enhance my inner beauty. Life is short, and there is so much things for us to explore, so be efficient in a day could give us more experiences on living as a human in this tiny planet. “Optimistic Nihilism” is something that I take as my mantra. Therefore, I would really much like to share my “5 ways of being productive in the morning”.
1. Try not to use your phone!
In our generation, phone is like a wonderland full of exciting news and events, we just can’t help taking a glimpse on it even we are merely awake. Checking emails, seeing the new post from celebrities on FB, or the chat box in the gossip group are all so attracted to most of us, but, after browsing others news and gossips, half of a day has passed. Instead of spending so much time on watching others activities, why not spend more time on exploring who you are and what you like? Let’s try go to the window and look at the weather today or folding blanket to distract your desire on using phones.
2. Morning exercise
Lots of people would rather sleep for a longer time than doing some sweaty exercise in the morning, but actually exercise in the morning give your body a healthy kind of fatigue and tiredness, which will provide you a higher quality of sleep. Some people feel sleepy even if they took a long period of nap, that’s because sleeping is not about “quantity”, it’s more about “quality”, you may happen to have a bad quality of sleep that result in unhealthy kind of tiredness. Jogging is definitely a great exercise in the morning, we can not only enjoying the fascinating sight around your house but also works better on your metabolism system. But for some people who do not like sweating that much, I highly recommend having Yoga as a morning exercise. Searching the inner peace by the meditation position, feeling your breathe in and out smoothly and stretching your body by downward dog position makes your body fully awake. And for those who do not have much time on doing 30 minutes exercise in the morning, we can just stretch our body to release the stress and tiredness. Remember to drink lots of water after having these exercise, to rehydrate the lack of water absorption during the sleep and after the sweaty exercises.
3. Choose the right breakfasts!
After exercising in the morning, it’s time to eat some energetic food for the breakfast. In order to have sufficient protein to build our body, we can have some boil eggs and whey protein with milk for breakfast. But I like to have more fun on making my own breakfast, so I choose overnight oat in a beautiful Mason Jar. My recipes include some roasted oat, Chia seed, cinnamon, banana, blue berries, and milk. You may change the recipes with different king of fruit like kiwi, strawberries, apples or else, and for the flavor you may add some greek yogurt and jams. Choose your best recipe, you’ll never get tired on eating that as a breakfast everyday.
4. Books and Podcasts
While having your breakfast, you can read the books for 20 pages at least and after a week and 3 more days, you can read a book with 200 pages. And do try some books that is not in your expert, for example, I read lots of books about others autographies, social science, finance and literature, despite i’m currently major in medicine. It will make you a more open-minded person and a higher intellectual humidity as well. As there are more and more podcasters in different platforms, I also recommend to listen to some of the interesting podcasters taking about their life like: Anything Goes with Emma Chamberlain, What We Said…and some talking about diseases like: This Podcast Will Kill You, The Geeky Medics Podcast…and some about personal wellness improvement like: The Science of Happiness, still some talking about the cultural life like: French is Beautiful…and so on. Sometimes open up the ears is easier that open the eyes in the early morning~
5. Make a To-Do list
For me as a busy medical student, there are tons of works to do for a day, but I found that sometimes I just forget to do something, and it might be important. To avoid such things happen, I write down a To-Do list on a piece of paper chronologically. And the funny thing is that I’ll write the simple and routine things down as well, for example: having Yoga in the morning, eat lunch with my friends in school and reading…. The reason I write these little things down is to make sure everything is smoothly going, because sometimes even we have wrote down something to do, we will keep procrastinate until To-Do list become To-Be-Continue list. Actually, is also quite easy to make a To-Do list on i phones, there is “Reminder” that can jot down list easily, however, I think if it’s jotting down on the paper makes the whole thing more seriously.
