Make Your Daily Routine Work for You

I’m very attracted to the idea of personal metrics. I love the idea of knowing exactly how much I sleep on a given night, how many calorie I ate, how many times I tossed and turned in that night, and a million other things about myself. There’s something very clean and organized about being able to monitor your progress at such a granular level. I never seem to be able to manage to record, let alone use, the data that I can though. What exactly would I do with it? I’m not sure, but I’d love to be able to really create a daily routine for myself that’s exactly right for the amount of energy I have at any given moment.

I do know some things about myself though, and one thing I know is that a routine is very important. Even though I’m not biologically a “morning person” I wake up early because I find that if I get up early, I get more done the entire day. It’s also the case that the world rewards morning people. Because I go to classes and have clients, I’m not able to stay up as late as I’d like and sleep in every morning. So instead of struggling through it, I’ve decided to get up early every day. I need to be out of my house by 7:50 or 8:10, one day a week by 6:30, having already done my spiritual practice (practiced my spiritual), exercised, showered, and written a page for A Space Within. I can’t claim that I do this every day. During finals things all seem to break down a bit, but this is my “normal.”

I take the Caltrain around 45 minutes each way and that’s where I read my RSS aggregator, which is my primary source of news, commentary, and blogs. I listen to a bunch of podcasts on a number of different subjects on my iphone at the gym and during my commute. On my commute home, I tend to do more reading for school, but I’m flexible about what I do on my commute. When I get off the train, I have a just under 2-mile trip on my Xootr Scooter, which takes me 15-20 minutes. So even when my life is really crazy, I still get 30-40 minutes a day on a scooter, doing something.

Because I’m still in the class work part of grad school, and I do 20-25 hours of clinical work a week, my daily routine is different each day of the week. But this way, at least they all have similar mornings.

What’s the takeaway? Here are my recommendations:

1. Utilize the power of routine. Even if each day brings different challenges and opportunity, they can arise out of the ground of you choosing your own mornings.
2. Work with your own body clock and other constraints to see when would be the best time for you to do what you need to do. Even if you’re not a morning person, if you have to get up early a few days a week, it might be best for you to get up at that time, or almost that time, every day, so it’s not a major struggle.
3. Make other choices to support the daily routine you want to have, like packing lunch the night before
4. Experiment and be gentle with yourself. Remember to have have fun in your process.

Related Resources:
Read more about my commuting via scooter.