What exactly is a bad day? It is simply any day in which things don’t work or go as planned. According to a survey, individuals in the United States average 60 bad days every year. If you divide that by the number of days in a year, that means in a year, individuals in the US have bad days 16 percent of the time. More often than not, “bad days” happen as a result of poor planning, bad habit, lack of foresight, or stress at work. Follow these six tips to stop having bad days.
1. Get enough sleep
Since inadequate sleep is one of the major causes of bad days, it is only logical that you should do your best to get enough sleep. According to scientists, the recommended number of sleep hours the average adult should get for maximum rest is seven to nine hours. If you are getting less, then you should remedy this.
2. Wake up early
Waking up early allows you to get a headstart on your day. For example, if you work a typical 9-to-5 job, it is expected that once it’s 9 am, your manager may be sending you email or messages. If you turn up at work 9 am on the dot, this does not give you enough time to catch up on your email or outstanding tasks. However, if you wake up early and get to work before your official starting time, you have enough time to catch up with both colleagues and your work, eliminating some of the risk of having a bad day.
3. Practice daily meditation
A typical feature of a bad day is things going out of control or it becoming difficult to rein in your emotions as things go awry. A good way to gain control of your emotions and attain a stable mindset is through meditation. Daily meditation enhances self-awareness, fortifies emotional health, controls anxiety, and reduces stress. These are four major ingredients that can lead you to stop having bad days. In other words, daily meditation puts you in absolute control of your day.
4. Always list and prioritize your daily tasks
Without a list, your chances of dropping the ball will be high. And a seemingly good day can suddenly change into a bad one when you suddenly realize that the day is almost over and you have left one of the most important tasks undone. Having a prioritized list will keep such mistakes at bay.
5. Review your day before bedtime
It’s a good idea to review your day just before you go to bed. The idea is to search for areas that require improvement. Maybe a particular task that took you two hours should have only taken up to an hour and 30 minutes. The aim of this review is to continuously increase your pace, improve your turnaround time, and push up your productivity. In other words, end your day right to stop having bad days.
6. Don’t procrastinate
When you procrastinate, you end up completing tasks in a hurry, which increases your error rate. And when the errors in a task are too many, you’ll have to do it again from scratch. Always ask yourself why you’re not working on a task at that moment. If there’s no good reason, start working immediately. That way, you’ll suppress the internal reluctance and reduce your procrastination habits.
Conclusion
By applying the tips above, you’ll be able to stop having bad days or at least reduce the number of occurrences to have fewer than the average of 60. Work the tips into your habits, and you’ll be able to apply them effortlessly.