A good day starts with a great morning ritual. One that consists of healthy habits, some quiet time for yourself and successful routines.

How you spend your morning is how you spend the rest of the day, and basically how you spend your whole life, as it is a series of days.

And if you manage to start each one with a few of the following, you’re sure to have the life of the people you look up to – the great successful role models of our time that know how to be productive and are mindful of everything they do.

So here are the best things you can include in your morning ritual:

1. Get up early

It all starts here. It won’t really matter what you’re going to do first thing after getting up, if it’s already noon and everyone else has got so much stuff done.

That’s a keystone habit, a powerful one. It takes time, but it’s worth it. Once you implement this every day, it will affect other habits – you’ll have more energy, be more productive, go to bed earlier, find time for yourself, etc.

Also, there’s something magical about the early hours of the morning. So use them in the best way possible.

2. Meditate

All you need to do is try to empty your mind for a few minutes.

Don’t think too much about the position of your body, whether you’ve eaten before that or not, don’t try too hard or try to control your thoughts.

Just relax, breathe deeply, let go of all your worries and leave what happened yesterday or what might happen today behind. Your goal is to stand still, enjoy the silence and focus on your breathing.

Do that each morning and soon you’ll be able to keep that state for longer.

Meditation has a phenomenal effect on your mind and soul.

3. Write

Writing is a therapy. It’s a beautiful experience where the mind wonders and you get to follow its journey by writing down the thoughts it gives birth to.

Here, you also need to just go with the flow. Write whatever comes first in your head and don’t think about how it looks, whether you’ll share it on your blog later, or if it needs editing.

Write your problems out. Share your secrets, dreams, desires and fears with a piece of paper. This way you’ll get them out of your head and will clear your mind for the day.

Plus, you get to do that in the best time of the day – the early morning – when your mind is still not fully awake, and dares to think of unusual ideas and interesting scenarios.

4. Drink a glass of water with lemon

Most of the times our body just needs water, nothing else. And after sleeping for so many hours, it’s dehydrated.

Give your immune system a boost and get some vitamins by adding lemon juice to it.

Lemon also alkalines your body very well which serves as a great way to keep the inflammation down.

You can also drink it warm.

This way you’ll wake up the body pleasantly. It will feel great that you don’t burden it with the usual dose of caffeine and will celebrate that by being fresh all day.

5. Figure out your MIT’s.

Another thing highly productive people do is to decide which their most important tasks are in the morning, and then start working on them right away.

Choose 3 of them and stick to them until they are completed.

If you work without any distractions and really commit to that, you’ll be proud to say that by noon you’ll have finished more things (essential ones) than most people do for a whole day.

It will also become the driving force that will get you motivated to keep yourself busy with other important stuff, and thus you can soon master productivity.

It’s not a coincidence that all successful people out there, who dare to follow their dreams and put effort into reaching their goals every single day, have habits like these.

It’s what really works. But nothing can convince you more than trying it out for yourself.

That’s the best way to kickstart your day, make the best of your morning and get ahead with what you want to achieve in life.

What other things can you add to this list?