Damien Soitout
A routine does not mean acting like a robot, having no surprises, or doing the exact same thing day after day. Having a routine is essential for anyone with long-term goals.
If you follow this blog or my social media, you already know I talk a lot about the importance of having a routine. A routine does not mean acting like a robot, having no surprises, or doing the exact same thing day after day. Having a routine is essential for anyone with long-term goals, because it lets you control how you manage your time and which tasks matter most (not urgency, but IMPORTANCE). People who work with me regularly ask about my routine: What do you do from morning to night? What time do you wake up? I bet you barely sleep! and so on.
My routine is not something that will work for everyone. Each person should find what works for them and keep refining their processes over time. I lived a long time without a well-established routine. For more than three years I was testing what served me and what did not.
In the same way I analyze the professional and personal lives of my clients, one day I stopped and did a full introspection of all my experiments.
The result was not great. I had gained weight, I could not breathe well after climbing stairs, and I never had a night that left me waking up completely fresh. The reason came down to two things:
The first step for me was realizing I had problems in certain areas of my life. Not necessarily things that would hurt me on their own, but combined with other habits they created a snowball that was very damaging to my well-being.
To see clearly what I needed to change, I downloaded a very simple app on my iPhone: Counter. It is free and lets you create many categories. The idea is that every time you do something that falls into one of the categories you want to track, you tap once to add “1.” Then I had an Excel sheet where, at the end of each month, I entered the monthly total for each category in the right cell.
In my case the initial list was:
After a year the result was simple: exercise was at zero, coffee was over 7 a day, alcohol was above normal, I was sick more times than my wife and two daughters combined, waking up fresh was at zero, vacation days were at zero. It was negative. The next exercise was to analyze where in my life those bad habits had started. Once I understood the origin, it became much easier to change them.
The mental work of deciding you want to do something is simple. Applying it is the real challenge. In my case I took a few vacation days and started writing down all my projects and dreams for the short, medium, and long term. As soon as I could visualize my goals and how to reach them, I started to feel my motivation grow.
What came next was starting the routine. In my case I began overnight. I was sure that taking things slowly would make me lose momentum, so:
When I present my routine, many of my clients ask why so many changes, especially in my diet. They know I love good food, and choosing to set aside products I love sounds hard. But it is important to understand that a healthy body gives you a healthy mind. Just because you love eating something that makes you sick does not mean you should keep eating it.
A client from Mexico shared her story with me recently. Read it here: Healthy Body, Healthy Mind.
It has not been easy. It has been progressive, and it took me more than three weeks to get used to this new pace of life. I am still adding new pieces to parts of my routine, but essentially it is already built and it works very well for me. Now a normal day for me looks like this:
That is the routine that works for me. On weekends few things change: work blocks are replaced by family time, unless I have a few pending items that need my attention. Essentially I try to keep as much free time as possible to be with my wife and daughters.
Further reading: Wikipedia.
