How you spend your 20s is hugely important for determining who you’ll become — personally and professionally — in the future.

Start waking up early.

Countless studies have concluded that early risers are more successful. Sleep experts say that if you go to bed earlier and wake up earlier, your body will be more in tune with the earth’s circadian rhythms, which offers more restorative sleep

Start traveling.

Don’t be a tourist but a traveler. This will help increase your vision and make you realize how big and small the world is at the same time.

Start taking care of your health.

The simplest and most important action you can take is to protect your health. Once it’s gone, it’s really hard to bring back. Most people in their 40s and beyond would trade money for health.

Start showing loved ones you care.

Little gestures, kind words. It’s not about constant contact, but more about finding mutual ways to share your life with the people you care most about.…And if you have a partner, show your love. Take nothing for granted. Life happens.

Start learning how to cook.

You might live alone now, but chances are at some point, you’ll be cohabiting with a significant other and/or kids — and this skill will come in handy.

Start asking questions.

By asking questions, you’re getting different perspectives from different people. Scientists say this kind of curiosity and knowledge-seeking can strengthen your personal relationships because you spend time listening, and boost your performance at work because you always want to learn and improve.

Start practicing mindfulness.

Mindfulness is about becoming more aware of your thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surroundings. Experts say it can help you perform better at work because it allows you to deal with stress in a more healthy way.

Start appreciating failure.

Take risks. Merely out of our teens, taking risks and failing is the best thing that can contribute to the making of an adult. The more we fail, the more we learn.

Start taking alone time.

Experts recommend spending at least half an hour every day in solitude. Make sure you don’t have your phone with you: Researchers say humans need true solitude, away from texts and Twitter, in order to understand their own behavior and experiences.

Stop feeling bad about the past.

There are two kinds of people in the world: People who live their lives looking back, and people who live their lives looking forward.

Not everyone loves writing, and I’m not convinced people should love writing.

It’s hard work.

I have a love-hate relationship with writing that has been cultivated over several years.

In college, there is no greater skill than the ability to communicate. We communicate every day.

You communicate with your professors in person and through email; with our friends and relatives through social media, like Facebook and Twitter; and with yourself as well as larger potentially unknown audiences in blog posts and other ways.

You communicate even when you don’t think you’re communicating, and the basis for much of communication is still the written word.

Five reasons you should write daily:

Writing enhances your ability to communicate.

In this culture, communication is so often hampered because we don’t know how to express ourselves, whether it be verbal or written. If you have trouble communicating what you want or asking tough questions, regular writing will give you a mind for structuring words quickly to achieve the desired effect in a diplomatic way.

Writing will remove stress from your mind.

Writing can be therapeutic. It can be a way to vent all the pent-up frustrations burdening your mind into a far less volatile form. Writing can serve as a form of cathartic stress relief where you finally get to say what you can’t say out loud. Note: be careful, don’t burn any bridges in the process.

Writing will develop your analytical skills.

Working through your problems with a piece of paper encourages you to think things through clearly, in both linear (sequential) and non-linear (creative) ways.

Writing regularly online will build your personal brand and help with job seeking efforts.

If you’re seeking a job after college, you’re going to need all the help you can get. Instead of spending hours binge-watching Netflix(don’t deny this fact, I see your Snapchat stories), you could spend 30 minutes a day writing and have something to show for it at the end of the summer.

Writing every day makes you good at writing.

The ability to write well is a powerful skill to be good at nowadays. Write every day to keep your skill with the written word sharp. Like any skill, the ability to communicate clearly, concisely and aesthetically degrades without practice.

There are no bad writers — only inexperienced writers.

Conclusion

And that’s just the start. The full benefits of this regular habit are, ironically, not something you can put into words, but something that must be experienced to be known.

Over time, you’ll learn the power of interaction with your audience, and draw inspiration and lessons from the audience. But for now, just get started.

Instead of replying to each email individually, I decided that I would create an online resource that I can reference with a collection of every tool that I use.

Note: I spend less than $50/month on tools and resources, so most of the tools I use are free. However, there are some paid versions. If I did decide to use the paid version of a product, there is usually a reason for it. 

Canva

Canva is a free graphic-design tool website, founded in 2012. It uses a drag-and-drop format and provides access to over a million photographs, graphics, and fonts. It is used by non-designers as well as professionals.

http://www.Canva.com

Wave

Wave delivers innovative financial services and award-winning free software to small- and micro-businesses around the world. By providing access to capital (Lending), improving cash flow (Payments), delivering money to employees (Payroll), helping businesses get paid (Invoicing), preparing for tax time and providing business insights (Accounting, Receipts), Wave covers the spectrum of a small business owner’s financial life, and helps businesses grow and thrive.

http://www.waveapps.com

Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a sales management tool designed to help small sales teams manage intricate or lengthy sales processes. Back in 2010, two of our co-founders, both seasoned sales managers, realized that the CRM landscape was populated by software designed to please the top brass while ignoring the needs of the people doing the actual selling. So they partnered with talented developers to create a CRM that puts the needs of salespeople first. Grounded in the philosophy of activity-based selling, the result is Pipedrive, a tool now used by over 50,000 companies around the world.

http://www.pipedrive.com

Asana

Asana is a web and mobile application designed to help teams track their work. It was founded in 2008 by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and ex-engineer Justin Rosenstein, who both worked on improving the productivity of employees at Facebook. It focuses on allowing users to manage projects and tasks online without the use of email. Each team can create a workspace. Workspaces contain projects, and projects contain tasks. In each task, users can add notes, comments, attachments, and tags. Users can follow projects and tasks and, when the state of a project or task changes, followers get updates about the changes in their inboxes.

http://www.asana.com

Webflow

Webflow is a professional drag and drop tool built for designing websites using responsive web design best practices. Webflow is a cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) that allows designers to build production-ready, responsive websites without any coding knowledge required. It allows designers to accomplish most aspects of web development and website distribution through a visual editor that provides the pixel-for-pixel design precision found in desktop graphic design applications such as Adobe Photoshop.

http://www.webflow.com

Conclusion

What tools and resources do you use on a daily basis? Leave a comment or share them with me via email:

hello [at] chasedittmer . com

I’m writing this list and making it public primarily for myself. I want to hold my self-accountable for accomplishing my goals and there is no better way than making my goals public and accessible to anyone.

I plan to add to this list as I reach the goals, add additional goals, and refine the goals listed below.

1) Track every dollar I spend.

2) Drink less alcohol.

3) Move to California.

4) Write a blog post/article every week.

5) Record one podcast episode every week.

6) Eat less meat and eat more vegetables.

7) Prioritize intermediate fasting.

8) Road trip across the states.

9) Get 1% better every day.

10) Read 20 books in 2018.

I’m working on writing a piece on my professional goals for 2018 and plan to share that in the near future. So, stay tuned for that.