Make room to be happy in life by creating a routine

The daily routine examples that I have seen over the years have ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. I have posted previously about Hijacking Habits without making life hard! and a good daily routine will empower you to maximize on the opportunities that become available to you by freeing up the power in your mind to be open to them.

You need a good daily routine that will allow the brain to use ‘shortcuts’ that you give it, meaning you will be free to make better decisions when it comes to the big stuff.

The more choices we encounter, the more likely we are to experience decision fatigue. The prefrontal cortex is the conscious part of your brain (the bit that you would call ‘You’) but it tires out very quickly.

It’s important to remember that this is a personal deal, there is no one size fits all daily routine.

Make room to be happy in life by creating a routine

A routine is defined as: a sequence of actions regularly followed.

It is not a ‘set in stone’ military drill. There are daily routines for good health and then there are specific daily routines for working people.

They are similar in lots of ways but the restrictions on an office worker are generally more stringent than those for a freelancer.

We often fall into routines, but this can cause us to never venture out of our comfort zone.

I’m going to tell you how to make a daily routine for yourself that won’t make you feel like a prisoner in your own life.

The building blocks of your life.

Take a blank piece of paper and create chunks of time where you have a defined responsibility. For example; if you work in a nine to five job then block out that time first. Then block out the commute times on either side of that, anything that has to happen.

Do it for your busiest day of the week.

What you’re left with is your free time.

If you regularly go to the gym or have a standing date with someone then block this time out. I would recommend using a different color for this to demonstrate the difference.

Sleep is vital for your physical and mental wellbeing.

Using yet another colour, mark your normal wake up and bed times.

This will most likely differ significantly at the weekends but it is important for your mental health and wellbeing that you are getting between seven and nine hours of sleep per night.

If you have to wake up at six in the morning then you should be aiming to get to bed by eleven at night.

What is left?

You’ll see that the space left is probably quite minimal, and this will force you to address some of life’s existential questions. Such as the big one I asked myself just before I quit my sales job and went freelance: Am I doing what I love doing?

As my routine took hold and became regular, I was able to make better decisions because my mind wasn’t always in a ‘reactive’ state.

My answer was “Not even a little bit!” so I took those little chunks of unused time and used them to create a routine that allowed me to stay in my job to pay my bills and do some of what I loved alongside it.

Review Every Six Weeks

As my competency and confidence grew in the areas that I get joy from (for me it’s creating content for social media, blogging, writing a novel, etc.) I found I wanted and was able, to do more which cleared the path for me to see how I could transition to making a living from it.