Any time you are looking for ways to be more effective in either your personal or professional life or to experience a heightened sense of well-being for that matter, one of the key things to focus on will always be your daily habits and routines.
The routines and habits that you engage in each day have a tremendous ability to influence your baseline energy levels, affect your productivity, and influence the way you look at things.
Here are just a few daily practices for optimizing your routines to make them as positive, life-affirming, and energizing as possible.
Utilise the art of “habit stacking” to add more positive habits to your existing routines
If you read some of the most popular books and articles about effective habit management, creation, and formulation, one of the most consistent and useful bits of advice you’re likely to come across will be with regards to the art of “habit stacking.”
Specifically, “habit stacking” refers to utilizing your existing habits, or part of your routine, as the basis for adding new and more positive habits on top of those existing ones.
An example of habit stacking could, for example, be to begin reading informative articles while drinking your morning coffee, such as Sentech’s blog post about LVDT characteristics.
Whatever habit stacks you end up creating, combining your new habits with your existing ones is one of the best ways of getting those new habits entrenched quickly and effectively.
Maintain set mealtimes and sleep and wake times
Maintaining some consistency in your everyday routines can help to give you a sense of stability and balance even when you’re dealing with all kinds of high-pressure tasks, projects, and situations at work or in life.
What’s more, there is evidence that maintaining set meal times primes your body for digestion and energy production at regular intervals throughout the day, and that maintaining set sleep and wake times is essential for properly managing your circadian rhythms and ensuring that you’re able to rest effectively when you do go to sleep.
If you eat your meals, go to sleep, and wake up at more or less random intervals, you will likely feel consistently overwhelmed, out of sorts, tired, and imbalanced in life.
Begin each day by thinking about what you want to do, and end each day by reflecting on how the day went (and what you’re grateful for)
Beginning each day by thinking about what kinds of things you want to do that day, and ending each day with a bit of reflection on how the day went, what you’re grateful for, and what you could do differently tomorrow, is a great way of adding a bit of clarity to your routines.
A lot of procrastination ends up being driven by an overall lack of clarity, and an unclear sense of what you should be devoting your time or attention to on a daily basis.
By beginning your day with a moment of thoughtful consideration, and ending it with a bit of gentle reflection, things may well turn out a lot more smoothly.