If you want to make the most of your time, the required actions must come naturally to you. And things that come naturally to you are none other than your habits. Fortunately, you can develop them as you want with deliberate practice, a bit more effort, and time.

Let's discuss the eight habits you should practice to change your life for the better.

1. Spend Some Time to Read Everyday

You must have heard this advice like a trillion times before. Every successful person favors it because it's just not the content you consume that makes you smarter, but the process of reading.

When you read, you reflect. You analyze. You concentrate on a particular thing for a long time. Likewise, you give it all of your attention and focus.

You may not realize it, but you're actually training your brain to focus on complex tasks for longer this way.

By constantly using social media, your brain's stimulus decreases tremendously. You're continually exposing it with new content every few seconds or minutes. Now, when you try to focus on something for a longer duration—studying, doing your job, or finishing a project—your brain craves the same level of stimulation. It makes it challenging to complete the task at hand.

And that's the reason you're distracted by even a tiny sound of a notification on your phone. Your brain has become habitual to those stimuli now. But you can change it by making it a habit to read every day, despite how little.

Use Amazon Kindle to Make Reading a Habit

You can either download the app on your phone or get the device for yourself. It gets all of your books in one place. That way, you can read in your spare time: on the subway, waiting for an appointment, or while traveling.

Download: Amazon Kindle for Android | iOS (Subscription required, free trial available)

Related: Websites Other Than Amazon to Find Great Kindle Books

2. Review Learned Information

What good is the information you spent too much time studying if you don't remember it?

With tons of thoughts going on in your head, the new piece of data you learned from a new source easily gets lost. And that's the reason people forget so easily.

However, just like you can learn a new skill through constant practice, you can learn what you studied by reviewing. So spend at least 20 minutes daily reviewing what you have learned. Make it a habit.

It'll help you retain information and data you've learned to pass a test or an interview. You can also use it to remember facts to give better opinions while conversing with others. That, by the way, will also reflect on your personality, and others will perceive you as intelligent. Here's an app that can help:

Anki

This Anki app can help you learn essential things through various activities like the flashcard method.

Download: Anki for Android | iOS (Free)

3. Track and Manage Your Ideas

Another thing that can help you become smarter is to keep track of your ideas always. Big writers and creative people do it all the time.

Ideas can come to you at any time, while you're in a shower, researching something online, or maybe working on a project. Suppose you manage a blog, and you're working on a college project, and you got three different ideas based on your project. Note them down instantly.

Not just the ideas, but a little description of what it was about and how you're thinking to use it. Learn from history. You never know when you may have a million-dollar idea.

Tools That Can Help

Consider taking notes as you encounter essential information while surfing the internet or researching a project. Apps like Evernote, Notion, and Microsoft OneNote can help.

4. Manage Your Time Wisely

I'm not making a dent in the universe by saying this. But listen, while technology worked so hard to make things easier for us, it made one thing extremely difficult for us—our ability to manage time.

Most people keep on watching videos or memes or just keep surfing the web, even after knowing they better be doing something else at this time.

The best way to avoid this from happening to you is to:

  • Put your goals on a piece of paper.
  • Make a plan accordingly.
  • Prioritize things; and
  • Make it a habit to make your to-do list the first thing in the morning, or before you go to bed, everyday.

This way, you know exactly how to spend the maximum time of your day. That can help avoid wasting time on social media and get things done. Here's an app that can help:

Stay Focused

It helps you manage your day better. To make it work, just set how much time you need to spend on a particular app or site per day. Once that limit is reached, it'll block their access. Plus, it keeps a track of your activity on the phone and shows how many times you unlock your screen each day.

Download: Stay Focused for Android | iOS (Free)

5. Exercise

Exercising 30 minutes per day doesn't only make you look good and improves your health, but makes you smarter too.

The half-hour you spend exercising each day increases your vascular activity and enhances your mental clarity and intelligence. Plus, when more blood and oxygen reach your brain, it helps build cognitive health.

And the more energy you start your day with, the more productive you can expect it to be. Here's an app that can help.

Home Workouts

It's a great app with over 2.3 million users around the world. You can exercise using this app without any equipment. It offers exercises for abs, chest, arms, legs, butts, and even full-body workouts are available.

You can perform the exercises every day in just a few minutes.

Download: Home Workouts for Android | iOS (Free)

6. Fill Your Day With Diverse Tasks

It's likely that you may not like monotonous things. Nobody does, not even your brain.

When you continuously spend longer time on a single task or project, your brain gets bored, stressed, and eventually slows down. So divide your day with different types of work every day.

It gives your brain a critical resting period to recover and prevents boredom. That eventually helps it to deal with different problems better throughout the day. Here's an app that can help:

Google Calendar

It's a simple but wonderful addition to your phone. Just list the tasks with time you have to do, and it'll remind you of them automatically when it's time.

Download: Google Calendar for Android | iOS (Free)

7. Build Deeper Understanding of Subjects

Most people work on a project just to complete it as soon as they can, or study for a test just for the sake of passing it.

But it becomes ten times easier to do something when you have a better foundation and a deeper understanding of the subject. It helps you get quick solutions and fix even complex issues regarding that case.

Is There a Way to Build a Deeper Understanding of Subjects?

Indeed, there is.

To make this work, find out your weak areas in the project or subject you need to work on and what you can do about them. If you don't have much experience in tech, and you have to spend hours researching problems before you can fix them—like something on your website—reach out to a friend or colleague who does. Take some time on a weekend and spend a few hours building understanding of how it works.

This way, when you face similar issues next time, you'll at least know what the actual problem is. Where to look for the solution and what to do about it? This method can work for any field you're in.

8. Learn a New Skill

A women learning a new language

When you have something to look forward to, you use your spare time more wisely.

For instance, if you're learning to draw portraits, whenever you're free instead of just playing video games or watching TV, you'll spend time drawing.

But if you don't have any such thing decided yet, you can pick something to learn that you always wanted to, like a new language, a musical instrument, photography, calligraphy, cooking, etc. It'll not only help you spend time more effectively but look smart too.

How to Learn a New Skill in Your Busy Schedule?

You can take online courses on almost anything you can think of using platforms like Udemy, Coursera, or The Great Course.

If you're into learning a new language learning, you can use these amazing podcasts that help you learn a language in your free time.

Related: How to Develop Your Technical Skills: New Hobbies to Learn

Build Good Habits to Become Smarter

If you act a little more conscious just for some part of your day and decide to practice good habits, you can achieve more than you can think of.