The time before work and after work is golden, and it’s usually completely yours to schedule.
Choose to spend some of that time on your passion project.
Morning and evening routines are the “bookends” of a prosperous life, argues Darren Hardy in his book, The Compound Effect.
Move your wake up time
Making time for your side hustle out of your 9–5 doesn’t necessarily have to be an after work hours-only type of thing.
You can work on them before work hours if you’re up for the added challenge.
Your morning sets the tone for the rest of your day.
Hal Elrod, author of “The Miracle Morning: The Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed to Transform Your Life” explains:By simply changing the way you wake up in the morning, you can transform any area of your life, faster than you ever thought possible.”
Use your mornings to achieve your goals and accomplish some pretty amazing things. If you win most of your days, the years will take care of themselves.
The hours after you wake up are truly precious because your brain is in one of its most creative states of minds.
That’s why many successful people put in an hour or so on their personal projects before they officially start their days.
You can get a lot done before dealing with other responsibilities at home or at the office.
Carving out the time in the morning to write, create, build, design, and making it a habit, means you would actually follow through.
You don’t even have to do a lot at a time. Taking small actions every day is what matters.
Ian Fleming, who is best known for his James Bond series of spy novels maintained a rigorous morning routine to stay prolific. He once said:
Writing about 2,000 words in three hours every morning, ‘Casino Royale’ dutifully produced itself. I wrote nothing and made no corrections until the book was finished. If I had looked back at what I had written the day before I might have despaired.
Early mornings are your sacred time to start your day right — don’t fill it with just news, email, social media, apps or notifications.
Don’t focus on drastic changes in the beginning.
Start slowly, by waking just 15–30 minutes earlier than usual. Get used to this for a few days. Then cut back another 15 minutes.
Do this gradually until you find a suitable time that works for your passion project before your other work begins.
Trying to do too many things at once spreads your focus too thin, and makes success less likely.
Change your evening routine
The time between clocking out of work and hitting the sheets every night is yours to do whatever you want.
How you spend the hours before you go to bed reflects the value you place on the most important things in life.
Using that time to pursue something meaningful to you will immensely improve not only your total well being, but sense of self worth.
Extracurricular outlets don’t just boost your sanity — they feed back into your day job and can actually make you more productive.
But the daily grind can easily overshadow passion project like writing a book, starting a blog, learning a new language, starting an online business, creating art, learning an instrument, designing, learning to code, collecting and selling vintage objects etc.
The biggest problem many people have is finding TIME to actually put ideas to work.
Striking a balance and committing time, attention and energy to that one special project that needs your focus is possible if you really want to pursue a meaningful project.
The trick is to turn that passion project into a habit!
What you do every night after work can be life and career changing!
Don’t settle
Surprise yourself every day!
It doesn’t matter if you succeed or fail — all that matters is that you made the effort. Simply taking action is often overlooked — but even the best idea is nothing without action.
Decide to pursue your passion project no matter how busy you are and create your best life.
Give yourself permission to create something you deeply care about.
Spend your mornings and evenings wisely and your passion project will be within reach soon. Set attainable monthly, weekly, and daily goals to help you take action every day.
Before you go…
If you enjoyed this post, you will love Postanly Weekly, my free weekly digest of the best posts about behaviour change that affect health, wealth, and productivity. Join over 50,000 people on a mission to build a better life. Courses: Thinking in Models and Kaizen Habits.
Originally published on Medium.com.
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