If You Don’t Have a Daily Routine You Could be Hurting Yourself

3 Steps That Can Optimize Your Life

When reading of successful people, they generally have some things in common. One of those things is a daily routine. This concept is foreign to most of us. For whatever reason, it hasn’t soaked in that waking up and doing random stuff isn’t an optimal game plan.

Why should we have a routine? What good does it do?

Studies have shown that having a daily routine helps in numerous ways. Having some predictability in life has a calming effect on the mind. You’re going to make a bunch of decisions throughout the day. A routine reduces the number of those decisions.

Let’s look at it from a different angle. Let’s see what NOT having a routine does to people. If you’re like me, one or all these things happen to you.

#1: Increased Stress: With the myriad of things that need to get done, having no plan will constantly keep you wondering when it will all get done.

#2: Bad Sleeping Habits: Instead of having a set time to sleep, you’ll go to bed when it’s finished or when you’re too tired to stay up.

#3: Bad Time Management: You have goals you want to accomplish in life. One of the keys to achieving those goals is having time to do them. With no routine, you’ll have a hard time ever getting around to them.

Bonus: Poor Eating: When you don’t plan out the mealtime, any drive-through will do! And we all know where this leads.

So how do we get a routine going? We will start slow and build on that.

#1: Plan Your Day: At first, planning your day will be challenging, but like most things, it will get easier. You can do it when you wake up before doing anything or at night before bed. Write out the things in the day you want to do.

#2: Start Small: Pick one or two things you want to start doing regularly. Choose to do something that will only take 5 minutes or so. An example would be reading a few pages of a book. Perhaps you can spend a few minutes in prayer. Whatever it is, make sure it’s small. It will boost your confidence.

#3: Be consistent: Consistency is the rope that ties life together. Anything worth accomplishing will be worked on consistently.

If we can wrangle the challenges of life just a little bit, we will be amazed at all the things we can accomplish. The sense of triumph will be more frequent in our lives, which in turn pushes us to accomplish more. We will be caught in a terrific cycle.

“Success in most things comes not from some gigantic stroke of fate, but from simple, incremental progress.”

-John C. Maxwell The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth

https://www.nm.org/healthbeat/healthy-tips/health-benefits-of-having-a-routine

https://www.piedmont.org/living-better/why-routines-are-good-for-your-health