by Kevin
Action Daily routine! Nothing gets me more energized than movement. Perhaps that is counterintuitive. Maybe you believe movement removes the energy? However, in my experience: motion creates emotion. So, if you want to get excited: get moving! This post is your formal and official call to action! If you need additional motivation, I have always found Shia Labeouf to be helpful.
Let’s rehash a little. Hopefully you can see the flow of these posts as it relates to the direction of your development: 1) You know yourself--you’re ready to grow yourself 2) You know your mission, 3) You have properly set goals that create boundaries for balance and actionable steps for development, and now... 4) Action: your daily routine. Steps 1-3 are useless without step 4. John Maxwell says, “you can’t achieve everything in a day, the secret of your success is found in your daily routine.”
Let me be even more clear: you won’t accomplish anything unless you are incorporating it into your daily routine. It’s shocking to me that so few people have a plan for each day. Not only that, there is no plan for their week, month, or even year! Perhaps there is a general 5-10 year plan, but no daily commitment to achieve it.
When you plan your day, think about your goals. How are you moving on your goals each day? I realize some goals don’t require daily action, but most do. Specifically goals in the areas of health, spiritual, and relationships. I agree that it is possible that certain financial and career goals don’t require daily focus and action, but some do. Challenge all of your goals to see if there is something you could be doing each day to make progress.
When I meet with a mentee, we develop an action plan (or daily routine). We start with the time you wake up and end with the time you go to sleep. I have found that my morning routine is most important to my development as I have more control over that period of time in my day. Therefore, I cover my spiritual goals before anything else. After that I focus on career, relationships, and health goals. My evening is set aside for relationship goals primarily, but I can also cover some career goals (reading), as well.
Also, this might surprise you, but don’t forget to schedule leisure time. I’m not talking about 6 hours of each evening with mindless netflix binging, but 1 - 2 hours is more reasonable. We all need to schedule a break or something we can look forward to in our day, don’t we?
by Adam
What an incredibly well-timed topic!
To preserve the timelessness of this post, and to help add context for those who are reading these hallowed words hundreds of years after I type them, let me explain.
I’m writing this in fall of 2020 from my home. That wouldn’t be so unusual, except for the fact that this desk I’m sitting at now doubles as my work desk. I’ve been working remotely since early 2020, due to this new thing called “COVID-19.”
Again, for the people reading this 100+ years from now: 1) I am as humbled as I am deceased by the fact this blog has had such sustained popularity, and 2) I’ll let you read the COVID wikipedia page for yourself to learn more about COVID-19. But, suffice it to say that, for me, among other things, it turned a fairly stable daily routine completely on its head!
What a weird, accidental daily routine experiment I’ve been living through. And, I’ve got to be honest, there have been positive (and negative) surprises.
The tumult in my day-to-day routine has helped reinforce the importance of having a routine in the first place. Without much planning (or foresight), my sudden work-from-home job meant an extra hour or so a day from a non-existent commute, and slightly less burdensome morning ritual. It also meant much blurrier lines between “home time” and “work time.”
Now, at first, I didn’t do a great job of being intentional about how I’d handle this new dynamic. I simultaneously reveled in the non-commuting time, but also let my daily routine slip into hapless anarchy. After a few months, I started to realize how this was impacting my goals. To prevent this post from taking on the length (and character) of a manifesto, I’ll just share one example.
The YMCA opens at 5AM on weekdays. Now, I didn’t always get there at 5AM, but I was there at that time more often than not. And, importantly, it was obvious and apparent to me when I wasn’t there at that time (or close to it).
But then, all the YMCAs around me shut down for several weeks. So many good things flowed from this one habit of starting each day with good exercise. Now, that part of my daily routine was gone. I started waking up a little later, and going to sleep a little later. And, while I have exercise equipment at home (treadmill, bike, free weights, etc.), I also have other things at home (dishes, that pantry I want to clean out, my television, a dog that likes to fetch….you get the picture). With all of that taken together, I was getting much less consistent exercise than I used to.
Now, this problem is easy (conceptually) to fix. But, as Kevin alluded to, there is no magic wand to wave. For my specific situation, I replaced my gym routine with an outdoor running schedule. But, more broadly, the fix is intentionality: breaking down my goals into the set of daily actions I must make to achieve them.
That’s the power of a daily routine. It’s right there in the name: it becomes routine. Taking those small steps toward your goals happens on autopilot. There is no latent stress out there: “you know, one of these days, I’m really going to have to do 2 months of cross fit and become the next Hulk Hogan to meet my exercise goals.”
Yet, I can say all that, and still not live it perfectly 100% of the time. As I mentioned, I was a 5AM gym person; but, one external shock to my routine put me on an unproductive course for several weeks! So, take this as an invitation to ask yourself that same question right now: is your daily routine, as it stands right now, aligned with your goals?