We were recently challenged by one of our fellow authors on this site to come up with an ideal routine or ritual that will help us become our best selves. Not that “success” is the end all be all of what we should strive for, but if you look at how the most successful and influential people go about their day, they take the guesswork out of a lot of parts of their day and have specific blocks of time allocated to tasks. For me personally, I’ve tried (I say tried, but honestly the effort put forth has always been minimal) to do this before, but always get stuck in my own head or simply ignore whatever alarm or reminder I have set up. Example: When I was doing commission-only insurance sales, I came up with my ideal prospecting (i.e. cold calling from crappy lead lists) routine. I had these ideas of when I was going to make phone calls, when I would work on other aspects of the business, blah blah, etc. etc. you get the drift. What I actually ended up doing was very little of that; the alerts I had setup on my calendar would go off and I would just swipe them away or ignore them.
I’m currently going through this same struggle. There are things that I want to or think I should be doing, but I’m getting in the way of myself. There are other things going on with my mental health, but that is something for another post. I’m not going to be *too* hard on myself. We are in the middle of a pandemic that does not seem like it’s going to end anytime soon, after all. So, here’s my current “routine”:
8:00am – 9:00am: Morning constitutional, shower, get dressed, get out the door. There’s not a lot of time here for anything other than those things.
9:00am – 9:15am: Drive to work. Luckily, this does not take very long.
9:15am – 9:45am: Get logged into work systems, read e-mail, get ready to start the day.
9:45am – 6:00pm: Work, lunch, work some more.
6:00pm – 6:30pm: Drive back to home, get settled in for the evening.
6:30pm – ???: Dinner, smoke weed, play video games, watch shows. That’s what it is probably 80% of the time. Maybe some reading. Maybe some light chores. Nothing super involved or taxing on the mind. I try to go to bed sometime between 11:00pm and midnight, which I usually do. My mind races when I try to go to sleep, so if it’s a good night, I’ll fall asleep in about 30 minutes. If it’s a bad night, I can be up for a couple of hours. I have a sleep medication I take which does help, but even then sometimes I am up for hours trying to sleep.
So, there’s the current “routine”. How would I change this if I were going to imagine myself as a high-powered go-getter?
7:00am – 8:00am: Morning self-reflection and easing into the day time. This could be some light reading, it could be journaling, it could be just planning out the day.
8:00am – 9:00am: Same process as before, get ready for work. Although if I get done or tired with the previous tasks, I could do things like oh, I don’t know, eat breakfast. Or just not feel so rushed.
9:00am – 6:30pm: Getting to work, working the day, and getting back home. The boring part of the day that I can’t really change.
6:30pm – 7:30pm: Dinner
7:30pm – 8:30pm: Exercise. We all know it is one of the best things you can do to improve overall mood and health, and I currently do not do a whole lot of it. This could be swapped with the dinner block, and maybe these times overlap. But I think two hours would be enough time to exercise and feed myself (or the other way around).
8:30pm – 9:30pm: Screen time. This could be playing video games or watching movies/tv. This could maybe get extended to 10:00pm, but I would definitely need this (at least at first) to keep myself sane.
9:30pm – 10:30pm: Personal development time. This could be a skill I want to work on, a new thing I want to learn, home improvement projects, all of that type of stuff. Having this hour here, late at night seems kind of weird to me, but it also makes sense based on the course of the day.
10:30pm – 11:00pm: Reading to wind down the day. This would probably help me get to sleep better, and would be more beneficial than going straight from screen time or some other involved task to bed.
11:00pm – 7:00am: Sleep!
After writing this, I noticed that there is still no time for things like chores, which can and do take up time. I’m not sure how I could fit these in, but they can also be worked on intermittently between tasks. There’s also the weekend, which I won’t plan out for right now.
So there it is! Let me know what you think, and post your ideal routines as well!
thefourBS 