Building a System of Continuous Self Improvement

So I'm not an expert on success, and I'm not the most successful person you will meet in your life. But in the past year or so I have realized that my life needs to change for me to be able to get somewhere with my life, achieve something.

So I started building a system that really transformed the way I live. Again I'm not an expert or anything close to an expert when it comes to productivity or self improvement, but these are the rules I followed, some I have picked from reading different books, some I just came up with and it helped me quiet well:

1- Pay yourself first:
I'm a father of two, and have a demanding job as a product architect and a technology manager in an e-commerce company with long working hours. And I have always found it hard to fit anything in my day. I used to convince myself that I'm a night person, used to sleep and wake-up late. Having that said, I have always thought that as a dedicated employee and a loving father, my job's and off-springs' needs should come before mine.

How wrong I was at that, after suffering from a thyroid disease for 4 years, I thought I'd give it a try and take care of myself first. I started waking up early at 5:30 AM for 5 days a week and go to to the gym; when everyone was sleeping and no one has any claim on my time. Then started reading regularly on my workout off days which is something I haven't done before in my life (since I got used to waking up early).

Now and after only a year, I have my first 4 hours of the day from 5:30 till 9:30 mostly dedicated to me. Building my stamina by exercising and, and my intellectual capacity by reading. And the funny thing is, my off-springs and employer could not be any happier, even when I show up late at work, I'm always fresh and productive. And I enjoy my time with my kids since I clear out the "me time" early in the day, and that makes them enjoy their time with me too.

2- Build good habits:
Building good habits is extremely hard work, but that's only for the first month. After you break the 30 day barrier doing the same thing everyday at the same time, it becomes hard not to do it. Keep that in mind while building habits and it will help you bare through the first adjustment period. Whenever you find your will waning, remind yourself "delayed gratification" is what makes human beings awesome. and it's only a month.

3- Combine the habits into a system:
Don't go changing your life all of a sudden; you will fail miserably. And that's something a friend of mine once told me. I'm the kind of person who used to get impulses to change his life drastically and always failed to do so. The trick is in building a system gradually, build one habit at a time, 2 at max and these two habits need to support each other.

4- Measure, Set Goals & Persevere: 
Don't just go about building habits without having a way to measure how well you're doing. Today technology makes it much easier to measure your performance in nearly everything you do. Set ambitious goals but put a workable plan to achieve it.

At the beginning of last year I thought how hard would it be to run a 1000 Km before the end of the year. It felt and sounded really hard if not impossible, but once broken down it meant, if I managed to run 200 days out of the 365 days in a year and run 5Km each time I would make it. And I set a daily goal of 5 Km. At first sometimes I had to walk to finish the 5Km; now I run faster than I ever did and I run 6-7 Km everyday.

I wanted to read more, and I set a goal of 2 books a month, that's not much and I listen to another 2-3 audible audio books while exercising.

5- Invest in your own well being:
Get yourself accustomed to spending on your good habits, I used to be a smoker for 15 years buying 1-2 packets a day on average, and I always thought that paying 5 USD on a book is expensive. After setting priorities straight I feel happy when spending money now on food supplements, books, running shoes; since I always remind myself that this money is going into building a better me.

6- Honesty with one's self (make no excuses):
We always tend to blame others for our problems and short comings, at least I did. One thing that changed my perspective is the belief that you are responsible for everything that happens in your life. If you want people to treat you well, value you or care about you. You need to start by doing it to them even when you think they don't deserve it. Do not make excuses for yourself, nothing justifies you not following through with your plans. "Argue for your own limitations and they become YOURS". 

Finally, the year is still not over, but nearly there. Following those simple tips above I managed to do the following things this year, and many still to come:

Aspect	Year Start	Year End
Reading Books	1-2 books a year	Over 20 books , and 30 audio books till now.
Running	couldn't do 5Km to save my life	I run 10 Km in 49 minutes, and I have run 1200 Km till now.