So it’s been a while since my last blog post. I had a nice initial run and it was definitely one of my best months this year, but it was really hard to maintain the pace.
I’ve dug into this to understand why I was able to do a blog post every day and it really boils down to one core concept: consistency. In order to execute consistently on really hard things, you must possess two things:
- Energy
- Routine
I’m definitely not a pro on the energy piece of this (topic for another post), but I can speak to routines with some level of clarity and hopefully, someone gets value out of my thoughts around it.
Here’s what I know about routines. They are dead in the water if they aren’t well thought out. Before I established my new habit of blogging, I took a strong look at my daily activities and noticed that my mornings were the most productive parts of my day. The second most productive part of the day for me was really late at night. The rest of the day is really structured between work meetings and family.
Knowing this about my day I found that if I were to tailor my day to go to bed earlier and work on things in the morning, I would make more progress towards my goal. The mind is actually much sharper earlier in the morning than it is late at night. Plus you can leverage solid sleeping schedules to enrich your cognitive abilities to retain information. I’ll give you an example of how this is working in practice for me. I’ve recently committed to teaching myself how to program in R and Python. A super difficult thing to learn if you’ve never been exposed to programming languages. As I was researching the best way to do this, I ran across a million articles from people who’ve taught themselves to code and they cite often that going to bed earlier and waking up earlier (like before 6 am early) noticed higher levels of productivity and the ability to learn faster.
This is obviously just my own personal research around it and I encourage you to do your own and experiment but know this. You will never be able to get anything done if it isn’t planned and thought out. I knew that if I didn’t pull in blogging as a part of my morning routine, then I would never get it done. Hence today’s post 🙂
So, my routine is always a work in progress. I’m always testing different things out to help optimize and dial it in. A couple of random tips that always help jumpstart the day:
- Go to bed early (Before 9 pm preferrably)
- Do mindful tasks when you first wake up, like meditation of blogging. (Preferrably with a cup of joe or tea)
- Do the hardest thing FIRST (Can’t tell you how much this matters. If you start off the day attacking the hardest thing on the schedule the momentum created for the rest of the day is enormous.)
- Be kind to yourself (I say this not to further add fuel to the “toxic positivity” flame, but don’t beat yourself up too much if you miss a day or so on the routine. Just commit to the next day. Get better everyday, don’t worry about being perfect.
It’s really easy to get caught up in life and not plan things out. It takes energy to plan, and execute. It’s doesn’t come naturally. We want to always take the easiest route to success but that route doesn’t actually exist. So keep working on the routine! Once it’s dialed in, you’ll move faster through your goals.