This post aims to provide tips for daily life. There will always be more to do, but that doesn’t mean whe can’t have fun while we’re doing it..

There’s Always a Lot to Do

Each day asks us to consider how much we could possibly accomplish.

Whether it be work, health, or a mix of both and everyday life, there’s always something more we could do (and several things that need to be done).

Despite the endlessly-expanding list of to-do’s, we often find ourselves stopped, struggling to find motivation to keep going (especially when we’re doing things we don’t want to do). Failure, imposter syndrome, and the inability to slow down are all symptoms of the same root stressor: anxiety associated with doing.

I find that I feel better each day when I spend a few minutes envisioning my dream life and imagining what it would take to get there smoothly. When we develop a better understanding of what we have to do in the short and long-term and how those demands impact our day-to-day living, we give ourselves the chance to do more each day and do it more easily.

Studying how your short and long-term goals fit into your daily life helps you conquer the day and venture on rain or shine. More importantly: you’ll be able to do more overall and feel better while doing it.

A lot to do doesn’t mean we can’t be happy, and a little work each day goes a long way.

Make Each Day Easier So You Can Do More and Feel Better

Learning to make everyday life easier is key to feeling better each day. We will always have things to do, and there will always be chores we don’t enjoy. Therefore, it’s important that we learn how to prioritize work, find enjoyment in the necessary tasks, and treat ourselves with respect when attempting things that are difficult or intimidating.

Making everyday life easier does not always mean doing less.¹ Sure, if you’ve signed up for enough work for a small village, you might want to refocus your obligations and lighten your planner. However, the main goal of these tips is to help you restructure your approach to daily life so that you can better stay on top of what needs to get done while keeping your vision for the future in sight.

We don’t need to live each day with our hair on fire. It all starts with treating ourselves with a little grace.

¹In fact, I find that restructuring my daily schedule improves my overall productivity and is more suited to quality work than an overloaded planner.

The Tips:

1. Treat Yourself With Grace (Especially in Failure)

Mastery requires substantial time and effort. From folding laundry to constructing new economic theory, we need to work, practice, and fail in order to get better and grow. Throughout this process, it is critical that we treat ourselves with grace.

We all want to do things perfectly. It feels good to crush a test or win a prize. At the same time, it’s not possible to do everything right all the time (unless we severely limit our visions, and, even then, I doubt it’s possible). Learning to try your hardest despite knowing you might not achieve your goals is key to growth and living each day better.

Treating yourself with grace is an acknowledgement that you are working hard toward your goals and that not every attempt will end with success. When we treat ourselves with grace, we make it easier to work hard and continue developing by removing part of the negative feedback loop associated with failure.

Avoid Creating Negative Associations

Things are harder to do when negative associations surround them. If each attempt to grow is tied to a fear that we will be hard on ourselves for failure, we will be less likely to put ourselves out there and try something new.

It’s important to push yourself toward success, and only you can determine whether you achieve your dreams. With that in mind, we have to recognize that part of the developmental process is failing, learning why we failed, and building from that experience. The smoother our acknowledgement of failure, the more easily we can learn it and use it to improve for the next attempt.

Treating yourself with grace will take you out of a perpetual anxiety state and shift your focus toward learning. From there, you will be in a better position to learn each day, making regular life easier.

If we want to maximize our learning potential, we must consider what we study in relation to our long-term vision to ensure our practice compounds toward our end goals.

2. Consider Your Long-Term Vision

Despite our best intentions, we often see a disconnect between what we do each day and where we see ourselves in the future. Our grand ambitions sit firmly in our minds, yet we tend to get lost in the day-to-day, and, before we know it, we may let weeks pass before taking active steps toward our goals.

We have to work toward our long-term goals if we want them to become a reality. If we spend a little time each day considering where we want to go, we’re much more likely to consistently work toward our visions.

Combatting Roadblocks to Your Vision

I generally see people run into two main roadblocks to considering their long-term vision on a daily basis: feeling like they must make major progress for it to be worthwhile and fearing that their vision isn’t clear enough to work toward.

Life is a combination of all the things we do while we have the chance. No matter how big or small, something completed is a step forward. We tend to disregard the small stuff in favor of the grand machinations, but it’s the combination of little things that create what we become. Each thing we do provides us with experience and knowledge, helping us move forward and better understand what’s to come.

With that said, it’s impossible to have a truly clear vision of the future because there’s so much we don’t know. New experiences add depth to the lives we live, filling our visions of the future with detailing brushstrokes. As the clever painter can use a new brushstroke to add context and correct mistakes, we too can refine and adjust our visions for the future to fit our current understandings and values.

Where you want to end up should impact how you approach each day. As you consider your long-term vision, you center yourself on a goal and make it easier to take steps forward. When you notice the little gains and changes, you allow yourself more opportunities to reflect and appreciate what you’ve accomplished. This will make it easier to enjoy the day to day in pursuit of your long-term.

While the vision is critical to success, we must also consider our daily needs to make sure we properly care for ourselves along the way.

3. Learn Your Daily Needs

A weak understanding of our daily needs is an easy way to knock ourselves off track, resulting in unnecessary stress and frustration.

So much of what we do each day must be repeated the next and the one after that, making it advantageous that we understand what we need to do so that we can account for these tasks in our planning.

Let’s say we don’t have a good sense of our daily needs and want to make a plan. Despite our best intentions, we will not have a full picture of our time demands, putting us in a position either to rush through our daily requirements or fall short of our plans, either way, setting ourselves up for frustration.

Taking time to study and improve your daily requirements opens up more time for everything else. No matter how simple something sounds, the basic tasks that we do each day can end up costing us more time than necessary if we do not pay them mind. Once you’ve identified your daily needs, work toward improving your basic regular tasks so you have more time for everything else.

4. Improve Basic Regular Tasks

Most daily tasks require more attention than we ever think to give. If we want to best utilize our time, we must improve how we approach and address regular basic tasks so that they take no more time or effort than they need.

From washing dishes, to doing laundry or decompressing with your partner after a long day, the things that seem basic and limited in scope often come with layers of complexity that can dramatically impact their time demands and overall success.

Take, for example, doing the dishes:

If you are a novice dishwasher, you might think washing dishes is easy and let them stack up until the sink is full. When you go to do them, you find that food is dried and crusted onto plates, oils from one meal have spread across all of your dishes, and the whole process is a stinky nightmare.

As you spend time considering the task, you notice how dishes generally clean more easily after use and decide to spray them when you’re done eating and pop them in the dishwasher. More time still and you notice how certain meals (guacamole, for example) are a nightmare when left to dry on plates and don’t clean well in the dish washer, while others can be placed in the dishwasher without pre-cleaning. This saves you more time still and reduces your water consumption.

Many of our day-to-day tasks play out like washing dishes. Daily life may seem easy, but if we want to get more out of each day, we greatly benefit from learning how the basics work. This will reduce unexpected headache tasks and give us much more time for the things we enjoy.

5. Build in Time for What You Enjoy Into Daily Life

All the professional success in the world means nothing if you don’t enjoy your life. Yes, money can buy you cars, trips, and reprieves from an otherwise tortuous daily life, but we benefit far more if we build time for what we enjoy.

Time is limited. We all know that.

While we may take that as a call to professional action, it also means that we have to protect and prize our time for enjoyment, as we will only get so much of it in any stage of life.

If you enjoy playing video games, set aside some time throughout the week to hop online with friends. Are you a big basketball guy? Get yourself a pick-up team, and/or set aside time to watch some games.

We can’t expect every moment of our life to be for happy-fun time, but if we build comfortable breaks that let us relax and do what we enjoy, we make it that much easier to get through everyday life with a smile. These breaks can serve as mental resets, rewards for a long day, and opportunities to connect and share experiences with those we love. After all, if we aren’t growing with the people we care about, how far can we go?

6. Help Friends and Family Succeed

We are social creatures. The life we live, regardless of how good, will always be improved if we can help those around us grow.*

When we take time to support and develop our friends and family, we offer ourselves chances to improve as well as develop our support system. Supporting friends and family is an opportunity to interact with new situations, problem-solve outside of our individual perspective, and show our support for those who care for us.

While it may not always be in our direct benefit to take time to help friends and family, it is a fulfilling experience that makes life more complete.

We do not need to maximize our days for individual self gain. In fact, I believe that this sort of approach would only work to isolate us, making any gained success empty as we would have no one to share it with.

*Note: some of you may read this and immediately think: Prisoner’s Dilemma. Nice play. I am running under the assumption that your attempts to help friends and family do not present betrayal opportunities. And, if you’re headed in this direction, I am not providing any advice on a “him or me” situation where one of you is going to prison and the other gets out free. Consult your own moral compass and consider the intent here, which is to promote developing your personal community and support system so that life is easier for you both.

Do Not Overstep in the Name of Helping

Helping people succeed is not a matter of living their lives for them. If you give someone the world, how will they know its value?

Rather, helping friends and family succeed is the acknowledgement that a little assistance and collaboration can make things better for all. We do not need to put out the world’s fires to be a helpful community member, but efforts we make to lend a hand can improve life for everyone involved.

Conclusion

Life is tough. There’s no way around that one.

Sometimes, when we’re going through everyday life, we can get caught up in the complexity of it all and become overwhelmed with the constant need to do.

Take a little time and percolate on these tips. I find that they help me, and I hope they will be of use to you.

Most importantly, go out and have fun with it! We only get the one life.

Thoughts or questions? Let me know!

-G

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