Self-improvement: resourses, sharing experience

[neopatogen]

I read Mastery last year as well, and it's one of the reasons I'm still pushing through art struggles :)

Recently I read 7 Habits of Highly Effective People as well, I wouldn't agree it's only about 20/80 principle. For example, the resource/result balance is a very important concept, I just realised I cannot explain it well so I probably must re-read this part. It also helps long-term and short term scheduling and prioritising stuff a lot.

One of the best books I read on the subject is The compound effect by Darren HARDY , free here https://soundcloud.com/larry-amos-jr/sets/darren-hardy-the-compound It's about building habits that we need in small steps. And there's a lot of energy in that book! 
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Well I'm writing this post now because several people asked me how I organise my day. My way of doing it evolved within about a year. It's basically a mix of stuff from all those books I read adjusted  to my needs. It would not fit everyone,  but I will still share it as long as I promised to. 

1. Long-, mid-, short-term planning. I do not only organise my day, but also plan a year, month and week. I write main goals in such areas as art, job, health, family and how/when I'm going to implement them.It's mainly an idea from Covey's book. I  try to spend a bit of time to evaluate if I did well at the end of those periods and adjust my plans within those periods if everything goes not as planned.
   Vitaly Bulgarov said in an interview he has every 15 mins of his day planned, I'm not that proficient :D
   
2. Prioritising tasks. It's in every book I read on the subject. 
   I write A for urgent job tasks, and art ones if I take part in some challenge and DL is soon. B is for non-urgent but important tasks that delvelop my skills in long-term. Covey and all other authors say we must devote time to B. For me it's my art studies and projects.  I write S for sport, although it's also B in fact.I also write H for household and other stuff, it's not from books, but this stuff has to be done as well.Sometimes I also write C for tasks which would be good to be done if time remains and E for the ones I definitely nust not do, for example  watch a TV series.For those who don't want to read books  here's an awesome article on procrastination that Amit shared back in the day.
   
3. Morning and evening routine. Every person that achieved great results in any field that I heard of has routines. I mean EVERY one, it's crazy. So I decided to give it a try, as well. It works because if we do same stuff on a daily basis at the same time, it becomes so natural that does not require any power of will at all. And we also program ourselves in the morning to stay efficient all day. You can listen more about it in The compound effect and in a Keys to a perfect morning list by Benjamin Hardy here
   So, I wake up early at 6-6.30 (well, I'm not perfect yet and sometimes I don't but I almost always do). It's not that early actually, I heard  that Bobby Chiu wakes up at 4.30, Jama Jurabaev at 5, Darren Hardy at 5 as well. The reason why it works might be that this early nobody would disturb you, and you can spend an hour or 2 doing what's important for you.I personally stretch for 20-43 minutes, think of my most important tasks today/this week/etc., sometimes re-read or write my long-term vision quickly. Then I do meditation for 2-12 minutes and Schmarzenneger's vacuum ABS excercise which takes about 2 mins.  The idea of meditation is from The art of learning  book by a world chess AND tai chi champion Josh Waizkin.Then I eat 6 nuts and spend 20-43 minutes studying art or doing a current art project. Cause I like to have a company for a proper breakfast and nuts keep me alife till then :)  My personal  evening routine atm is to practice 3D for 25-43 m, write a plan for tomorrow and learn Hungarian for 5-15 minutes, but sometimes I manage to do some 3D earlier.
   
4. Focused work and breaks. I like 43 minutes work and 7 minutes break using a timer. Brain scientists say we focus best for 10 or 45 minutes periods, but I heard 43m from Eliott Hulse and just liked it. In the free Learning how to learn course on Coursera https://www.coursera.org/courses?query=l...to%20learn they explain real well how focus/break strategy works againsst procrastination, they recommend to start from 25/5 mins.
   
5. Tracking progress and time. Awesome idea from the Compound effect and Amit's video. I have some trouble with tracking art progress though, it's much harder than tracking work out results, would be great to hear how you do it guys. 
   
6. Tools are not that important as brushes in Photoshop :), but I just loved Evernote, I have a year of free subscription from my mobile operator.  Peper is awesome, but I tend to chicken scratch sometimes or lose it, or have several notebooks, and this way I have all my notes in one place and systemised, and I can take photos of my hand-written notes there as well. There are a lot of free apps for notes and planning as ell, I mean I don't want it to sound like too much of advertisement :)
   

Of course I'm not perfect and slack off sometimes. But those resources and strategies help me a lot to keep going. Hopefully this will help someone as well.