Routines, Carefully Crafted, Are Your Stepping Stones To Your Success On Your Terms
Building morning or evening routines can set you up for success and personal growth each day. The ideas presented in this article, compiled and adapted from several sources, sound like universal truths because they are!
You have likely heard that for people who want to improve their financial situation, they should write down every expenditure to identify how they currently spend their money. Once people document where they spent their money, it becomes a lot easier to identify any necessary changes. They can use their cash more productively and do something important to them.
It is the same for our time.
Let’s Do A “Routine” Inventory
Documenting where you spend time helps you to understand potential ways in which we can improve the valuable investments you make every day, even every hour.
Study after study tell us that successful people block out time each day for key priorities.
For some, it might be a morning strength training workout and a breakfast smoothie. For you, it might be a crisp morning walk with friends and neighbors. A young father might reserve the evening hours for one on one time with his children. Spouses might have pancakes on Sunday morning and swap stories.
Regardless of the routine, successful people reserve space every day, at the same time or location, to do something meaningful.
In other words, they are using daily rituals to accomplish what matters most to them.
Make Success Easier to Find – Book it!
We have all heard about the importance of daily rituals and routines. Yet, we still underutilize them, and often it is because we underestimate their power.
By eliminating the need to remember and sequence the steps you are taking, rituals allow you to be more creative, help you reduce mistakes, and speed up your work.
Just like those pre-game rituals followed by professional athletes, daily routines are a series of predictable actions that set you up to win. This is perhaps most true of morning and evening rituals.
Daily rituals (routines) are a series of predictable actions that set you up to win!
A morning ritual allows you to begin your day with focus, clarity, and direction. Properly designed, it ensures that you win in crucial life areas – like your health or intellectual growth – before you have even begun your workday. Similarly, an evening ritual allows you to end your day with a sense of purpose.
Let’s Get Started with Your Routine – Here’s How
- Examine your current morning and evening rituals. What do you do from wake-up until you leave for work? And what do you do in the evening before heading to bed? Notice what it is you do – regardless of whether it is positive or negative.
- Document these existing morning and evening routines. There is something hugely sobering when you see your routines written down. They are there in front of you and something that will help you determine your next steps, just like when you write down where you spend your money and suddenly realize that you spend $50 a week on coffee.
- Assess whether you are getting the results you want from these current morning and evening rituals. Looking at these morning and evening ritual lists, use your research to decide which of them you should keep doing. Some things will need elimination, making room for the new routines. I sense that we can always be doing a bit better. A good question to ask ourselves is, “How do I want to feel after completing my morning and evening rituals”? The answers to these questions will often lead you to the decision about what to change.
How do I want to feel after my morning ritual? Knowing the answer will help you decide what morning ritual you choose.
Make the changes you have decided on to your morning and evening rituals. What needs to stay, which needs to change, and which new ones you need to add?
4. Now, get going with your new morning and evening rituals.
You may need to make adjustments as you go along, but the important thing is to get going on the rituals and make it a part of your day. You will surprise yourself with the results, and that will inspire and motivate you even more.
And, finally,
Remember what your goal is for doing this in the first place and keep that top of mind. Your morning and evening routines are the waypoints along the route to your destination.
I have been doing this for years. And I make adjustments and tweaks as I need to, but I can tell you this process has been a massive part of any success that I have experienced. And it can be the same for you too. I guarantee it.
