Many of you have felt the sudden rush in your mind and a numbing feeling at the same time, usually in the morning when you wake up or just before you are about to punch out for the day at the office or just before an important meeting.
The rush is your brain working overtime to find excuses to justify why you are late again or why you didn’t finish the assigned tasks or why you prepared aren’t.
The numbness is because you don’t have a justifiable and rational answer for the question “Why didn’t you do it?” or “you are late for the fifth time this month, and it is only the 20th!”
Do you wonder why many of your co-workers and friends are never late for work or meetings and are also prepared when they arrive? They don’t leave anything on their desks unfinished when they call it a day.
When your co-worker wakes up at, say, 5.30 in the morning, she has more time to look after herself and her family. She can go for a walk or do Yoga or only workout. She is in no rush to have a healthy breakfast with her family in a pleasant setting.
She can shower leisurely, dress nicely and neatly, and pick her favorite coffee on the way to the office and read the day’s important news on the ride. She also has time to plan and prioritize her work for the day and recheck her schedule to bring it together.
For you, it is more like that you wake up wholly dizzy and short of sleep even at 8 or 8.30 am because you were binge-watching the new web-series till late last night or, should one say early morning? Your head is clogged and spinning due to lack of sleep, you are irritable, can’t shave properly, and can’t even find a proper dress.
Your irritation shoots when you see that your breakfast isn’t ready, and you have to make do with biscuits and cookies again. In your rush to office, you jump the light, are pulled over by the traffic police officer, pay the fine, and make it in the time you are late again.
Solution: Routine
Have you noticed there is only one difference between your friend and you? And it’s not intelligence or skills. It’s called THE ROUTINE.
Following a routine means, you know how to prioritize and don’t want to complicate your life. Because of repetition, they are powerful and answer the question of how to plan better.
When the famous martial artist and actor Bruce Lee said, “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” He referred to the power of practice and following the routines of daily exercise.
Life Coach notes that with a routine, our brains start working on autopilot, like:
Step 1: You associate things and events as a cue for doing something else.
Step 2: Execution. When you do the task, you reach a milestone in the daily routine. This leads to further cues and actions, all automatically.
Step 3: Collect the benefits of routine with more tasks complete as you go ahead.
Peers and bosses appreciate your co-worker, and you are scolded because of following a schedule. She has a daily schedule for success, while you have the perfect recipe for disaster.
Life Coach has great daily planning tips to help you get out of the chaotic mold and set up and follow a routine for yourself. She has coached many students and executives to set up their daily plan for success.
She says building a success routine or learning how to schedule your day effectively must be divided into parts. When we split, it sees things in isolation, and as just this one thing to do.
Morning Routines
Setting up your morning routine is of prime importance as it will affect everything. This will be your first lesson in how to plan better and create a way for success.
A little discipline and following the routine on day one will have a cascading effect on your entire day, week, and even life.
Your morning routines can include meditation or jogging. She suggests, regardless of what you do, the following daily planning tips to start your day:
- Rise Early: All, well almost all, high achievers rise early and prepare for the day ahead. They can think clearly and plan while everyone else is fast asleep. Apple CEO Tim Cook, Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama, Indra Nooyi, and Richard Branson are all early risers. Even if they have late-night flights or meetings, they have trained themselves to wake up early to disturb the routine. It helps in increased productivity, greater creativity, and more “me” time.
- Make Your Bed: A simple yet powerful task. And day’s first achievement! The mind needs continuous doses of the accomplishments for self-encouragement. So even such ‘small’ tasks completed can start making a difference in attitude. Also, as Ritu Singal often says, small things in life matter more as they are many. If you start celebrating and acknowledging them, you will do the more important things right.
- Positive Affirmations: Life Coach insists actively designed and written affirmations, if repeated daily with conviction, have the power to rewrite the coding of your brain and alter your psyche. She suggests simple affirmations: I love and accept myself as I am, without judgment; I have strength, courage, and clarity of purpose; I attract opportunities that create more money; I make a difference at my work and my work.
- Healthy Routine:This includes daily exercise or Yoga, meditation, morning walk, cold showers, and a healthy breakfast with fruits. Their simple things have a transformative effect than many of the fancy and expensive items in your life.
In doing all these, you get to know yourself better, come closer to your inner self, and have a clear mind with a healthy body to face the day’s rigors.
Day Planning
During the day, there are many things that you can plan and set in your schedule or adjust them. These can be meetings, paying bills, servicing cars, maintenance at home, attending a wedding, or anything. You can have a separate office and personal planners, or you can have a typical planner. You may use online and mobile apps to schedule your day and make appointments, or you can have a daily diary to take notes in.
Life Coach says that whatever the medium is, the message is essential and prepared and stick to the routine.
- Create a Daily Plan:Create a daily plan at least 1 to 2 days in advance so that you have enough time to think through all factors. The blanks can be filled in the night before, and some room left for contingencies.
Please make special note of appointments, team, place, and time and never make anyone wait for you; it’s impolite. Schedule some ‘me’ time within a planner even during the day, like office walking or stretching.
- Prioritize:Identify your top 2-3 priorities and get them done to help the whole team move forward. This will also help your team prioritize their work. Be realistic and practical and always leave the room of unforeseen events.
Evening Routines for Tomorrow
Reflect and plan. With a night-time routine, you prepare for the next morning, taking its shoulders’ burden.
- Prepare Goals: Finding the most critical daily aims allows you to identify essential tasks in advance and allows your brains to process them while you are asleep. You may, in the subconscious, come up with a brilliant strategy to solve a pending issue.
- Reflection:Every moment in life is a learning opportunity, and in life’s hullabaloo, we miss them. When we reflect on the day gone by, even for 5 minutes, we will find many instances where we could have done better or not done anything. Evening reflections are like running daily “spell-check.”
- Clear your head: It is like tuning yourself out of the world and tuning into yourself. You should be with yourself when going to bed, as in your sleep only you exist! Emptying the head helps you put aside the challenges and relax like a baby.
You can meditate, read something light, and listen to light classical music, or go for a walk to clear your head.
Conclusion
According to Life coach, it can be challenging to build routines in the beginning. It takes active willpower, support, and coaching to design and execute a realistic way.
The best news about routines is that they become easier to follow with repetition until they become a habit.
It is generally said that it takes 21 days for a habit to set in, and a routine intends to change many old practices. So, according to Ritu Singal, daily routine monitoring and follow-up is necessary at least for 6-8 weeks for them to solidify to the extent of becoming habits.
Initially, it may seem to be uncomfortable, tedious, and boring. But with each day, you’ll see small and large problems in your life start disappearing, and you will have more time to give to yourselves.
If you make a checklist and pass it in your room, wardrobe, in your briefcase, as desktop wallpaper and set as an alarm on mobile, you’ll have many visible and active cues to bring you back from any diversion from the routine.
So, what’s your routine for tomorrow?
