- Assess Your Current Schedule: Start by tracking your activities for a short period of time; I always recommend a week. Identify patterns and note times when you feel most and least productive.
- Set Clear Goals: Define what you want to achieve in your personal and professional life. Your routine should be a roadmap to these goals.
- Prioritize Tasks: Not all tasks are created equal. Use a method to prioritize tasks. The one I use when working with clients is the Eisenhower Matrix although any method you feel comfortable with works just as well. The objective is to categorize tasks by urgency and importance. This ensures that your routine focuses on high-priority activities.
- Create Time Blocks: Dedicate specific times of the day to different types of tasks. For example, reserve mornings for focused work and afternoons for meetings and collaboration. You will know from step 1 what your optimal time is for each type of activity (when you are at your best for creative thinking, for play, for exercise, and when your energy is at its lowest and you need to rest).
- Incorporate Breaks: Schedule regular breaks to rest and recharge. Short breaks during work sessions and longer breaks for meals and exercise can significantly boost productivity. This point is important. Do not forget to schedule breaks into your routine if you want to keep sustainable performance!
Be Flexible: Life is unpredictable. Allow your routine to be flexible enough to accommodate unexpected events without derailing your overall plan. I always recommend two things:
a. when you schedule a task or activity, allocate more time than you think it will take (I recommend a buffer of 25 percent extra time). This will ensure you finish your task within the allocated time which will result in lower stress levels and higher motivation.
b. Build in buffer slots; maybe thirty minutes longer in your lunch slot or fifteen minutes longer for your coffee break. If everything goes smoothly and you have no use for it, you can reward yourself with a longer break or you can take advantage of it to complete a quick short task. Either way, it will make you feel good and motivated.
Review and Adjust: Regularly review your routine and make adjustments as needed. When working with clients, I recommend reviewing every week. What works today might need tweaking tomorrow as your goals and circumstances evolve.
lt is important to remember that a routine is created by repetition. The more you repeat it, the easier it becomes. Keep focused and determined until your routine becomes second nature and you can enjoy the extra energy and focus
How to break a bad routine
Let me start with the bad news. As I explained before, you cannot just break a bad routine. A routine is built into your brain by repetition. The connections between the neurons involved in that routine have «talked» to each other so many times that the path that links them together is strong.
Does this mean we are stuck with a bad routine forever? No, not at all!
Although a routine cannot be broken that does not mean it has to stay forever. The way out of a bad routine is to replace it with a good one. This is the trick: you cannot break but you can replace.
The way out of a
bad routine is to
replace it with a
good one.
To explain this, let’s go back to the path in the meadow example. We have created a path by walking on the same spot for a long time. At some point, that path is not good anymore and we need to change it. What do we do? We simply start walking on another point in the meadow and create a new path. To begin with, walking on the new path will be more difficult than walking on the old and well-trodden path. We will be tempted to go back to the old path as it is easier.
However, as we remain determined to keep off the old path and continue walking on the new one, the old path becomes less and less visible and the new path becomes increasingly familiar and easier to walk on. There will be a moment when the new path becomes stronger than the old one. This is when we have replaced the old path with the new one.
Replacing a routine is very much like this. The first step is to become very clear about our intentions to replace an old routine with a new one. Then we need to be focused on practicing the new routine, even though it will require more effort than the old one. There two key elements to this replacement:
a. clear intention on what the new routine is going to be and
b. strong determination to keep repeating the new routine until it becomes easy and familiar. At some point, the old routine will fade away and will be replaced by the new one.
