How to Actually Use the Tips You’ve Read in an Article

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You read a how-to article online.

It could be about seamlessly planning an event, updating a social media account, getting more sleep, or successfully trimming your email subscriptions.

You’re excited about applying these tips to your daily life, but for some reason, you hesitate.

Reading an article is one thing, but how do you actually turn those tips into actionable steps?

In this post, I offer some step-by-step instruction on how to take the tips you’ve read in an article, and work them into your daily routine.

Scan the article.

If you’ve never tried this technique before, you should definitely give it a try!

Scanning an article allows you to get a bird’s eye view of what’s to come.

It makes the reading process much more manageable.

All you have to do is read the article’s title, and then read any sub-headlines, or sub-sub-headlines.

When you’re finished, go back to the beginning of the article to…

 

Read the article in-depth.

Take your time and read the article from beginning to end.

Make a mental note of any tips or areas that are of particular interest to you and your needs.

You don’t have to worry about details at this point, we’ll get to them a little later.

 

Summarize key points of interest.

Grab a piece of paper and a pen, and summarize key points from the article as they apply to you and your needs.

This summarization will help reinforce why you want to take the tips from the article and put them into action.

You could summarize tidbits of information, relevant statistics, general pointers or pieces of advice.

A bullet point for each key point works well.

 

Convert tips into tasks.

Scan the article again and find the tips you’d like to implement.

Write down each of these tips onto separate lines.

Now, some tips will be single, easy-to-do tasks in and of themselves. You can let these stand, as is.

Other tips, however, will be made up of many different tasks and you’ll have to divide these tips into smaller, bite-sized pieces.

 

Schedule tasks into your calendar.

Take your newly converted tasks and schedule them, one-by-one directly into your calendar.

This ensures you’ll actually have time to put the tips into practice.

Let’s say you created a list of five tasks. You could schedule thirty minutes each weekday to complete these of tasks.

Another way of doing this is to schedule blocks of time, say an hour or two at a time, and work on these tasks until they are complete.

How about you? How do you go about implementing tips you’ve read about in articles? What’s your go-to tactic or approach? Join the conversation and leave a comment below!

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About the Author

Rashelle

Rashelle Isip is a New York City-based productivity consultant who helps successful entrepreneurs and business owners manage their time and energy so they can reduce stress, work less, and make more money in their businesses. She has been featured in Fast Company, Forbes, NBC News, The Washington Post, NPR, and The Atlantic. Get her free guide, 5 Unexpected Things You Need to Organize a Work Notebook, by clicking here.

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