On Routines

If you want to achieve anything — material or otherwise — you have to set a routine. Your routine is your core transport to success. Remember that.

Every successful individual gives themselves a routine they can fall into. If you want proof of this, I highly recommend reading about the most successful people you’ve ever heard of (think Julius Caesar, Mark Cuban, etc.).

Routines give you sustainability and exactitude to your day. That means you can cut away the fat from those activities that are bloating up your schedule and use that newly discovered time to complete activities that you’ve put on hold.

Here’s your stepwise method to establishing your routine:

1. Break your schedule up into chunks of one hour or more (any segmentation smaller than this will reduce the likelihood that you’ll have enough time to get things done).
2. Determine the activities that take precedence over anything else. This can be doing “work”, doing your laundry, setting time aside for reading, etc. . Mark your calendar with those prescribed, recurring activities across the week and stay consistent with the time of day you’re performing those tasks.
3. Now that you’ve established what you need to get done, you can start thinking about what you want to do outside of the mundane day-to-day items. Position those items in a dispersed fashion across your remaining time-slots in the week so that you can extend the pleasure you get from them. Give yourself something to look forward to everyday.