Alarm goes off. “Five more minutes”. Snooze. Sleep. Repeat until you’re late.

Ignoring your alarm repeatedly creates a habit, and habits are hard to break. You start to ignore it more and more because you’ve conditioned yourself to do so. Even if you want to get up early, your subconscious is working against you.

Small snoozes quickly add up too – just 15 minutes each day sends 91 productive hours down the drain every year. That’s more than two working weeks you waste each year.

Knowing how to wake up early is only half the battle – to start your day the right way, you need to make it an automatic reaction to your alarm.

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The day I adopted my dog I learned a brutal and immediate lesson about myself and my daily habits.

Nothing makes you analyze your life like a 60 pound furbeast jumping on your face at 6 in the morning immediately after she decided to redecorate your living room with your most recent bulk toilet paper purchase from Costco. (The good stuff, might I add).

The first week of having this dog was hell.

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Organize Your Adventures With Process Street

The new year is bearing down upon us.

With it, resolutions and promises of personal change will fill our newsfeeds.

“This is the year I’m going to really hit the gym!”

“Committed to curbing my spending this year. No wasting my money on silly things!”

“Decided I’m going to travel the world at some point this year #goals #YOLO”

We can laugh at others, but we’re all guilty of it.

Despite all the promises made for New Year’s resolutions, the vast majority of us will fail to stick to our commitments – only 8% report being successful! Why is this?

It depends on each individual, but New Year gives us a time for reflection – a momentary pause in the hustle and bustle of our everyday lives. Those revelations found in that temporary calm can get lost when real life kicks back in.

You stop thinking about the promises you made and begin to settle back into your normal routine. To break that routine, something structured and goal driven is needed – something which pierces your existing schedule.

This is why we at Process Street have developed these checklists for life.

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Over the last year working remotely at Process Street, I’ve been researching as I go. I survived on dumb luck and baseline writing skills.

However, in the last 30 days I’ve built a system to teach myself how to read more. I’ve built up a library of articles, authors, quotes, books, tips, and ideas I can draw upon whenever I need to write or find the motivation to keep going.

The best part is that I spent next to no extra time outside of work in order to do this, and it all boils down to five elements:

• Filling dead air with podcasts
• Setting up an RSS feed
• Always having a book on the go
• Productively procrastinating
• Following 50 people on Twitter

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Ah, procrastination, we meet again. For all of my talk on how to improve productivity, to a certain degree I find it impossible to permanently find the answer for how to stop procrastinating.

What I can do, though, is explain why we procrastinate and give some tips to some out on top as much as possible.
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Thinking of starting a side project?

A month back, I realized I was getting to the point where I wasn’t bothering to take lunch breaks. I read as a big part of my job, and I didn’t want to get involved in anything heavier than reading articles. Frankly, I was bored during my lunch breaks and I got annoyed I wasn’t doing anything productive.

The solution?

After brainstorming several side project ideas, I started making a personal website.

This was the perfect amount of work because I had (very) basic HTML skills and needed to learn only CSS and how to deploy the code.

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Two weeks ago I had a brainstorm with my team to think of how to improve productivity; the 4 ideas we came up with increased my output by 375% and ensured that I no longer resort to 70 hour work weeks. Obviously, this was just too good to keep to the Process Street team alone, so stick around if you want to find out how I did it!

‘Being more productive can have an awesome positive effect on the rest of your life as you start to feel generally more positive due to lower stress levels and more free time to do what you really love to do.’ – Dr Jones

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This time last year, I was a pretty horrific writer. Just go look at my old blog posts.

…Actually, please don’t.

I was an avid reader of the tech press throughout my teen years and into adulthood, but it always seemed like a distant, snarky world guarded by unreachable journalists for whom inbox zero is an in-joke.

For a copywriter churning out product descriptions of model cars (my day job last year), it’s an even more distant prospect.

A few months back, I made my debut at TechCrunch, my holy grail, writing on user experience design – a topic I knew shamefully little about which would be read by those that lived and breathed it.

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