Daily routines help many of us stay productive and balance work with our personal lives. While the perfect routine will differ for every individual (as they have for even the most famous creative people), you can design your ideal day with these tips from Comfort Pit’s Jon Brooks.
Picture: kayakaya/Flickr
Brooks offers a great guide on planning out the activities you want to do every day, from tracking your time and sorting activities by how meaningful they are to your life to creating daily rituals based around four categories of activities:
In the creation of our perfect daily routine we need to find rituals and systematically employ them to best suit their context. Watching television or playing a video game all day is obviously unproductive. But as a ritualised recovery or a reward, such pastimes can improve productivity.
Everyone will have different meanings for different activities but as a general rule of thumb, all activities fall into four categories: biological needs, meaning, rewards, and happiness boosters.
Basically, the first layer is biological needs, so you’ll schedule sleeping, showering, exercise and eating first. You then layer in meaningful (but optional) concrete activities, such as working, studying and creating art — and then — this is the important part — tie rewards such as watching TV or web browsing to those meaningful activities. For every three hours of work or studying, for example, you reward yourself right after with one hour of a pleasurable activity. This reinforces your daily good habits.
Finally, happiness boosters are things outside of your daily routine that should still be part of your weekly routine — such as visiting friends or going to the movies.
Every day won’t be exactly the same because life won’t let that happen, but you can structure your days and keep tweaking while focusing on these important areas.
Designing the Perfect Daily Routine [Comfort Pit]
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