Having a routine is one of the things that can take us to speed and simplify our days. As developers it’s our job to get complex problems and simplify them so that many others can use. One thing that we should do for ourselves is simplifying our own days. With so many decisions that we have to make on a daily basis we should lower the decision fatigue as much as possible. One way to do that is by installing daily routines. In process of creating these routines we should consider what works for us and what won’t. Routines can reduce the feeling of not having enough time for what we like to do which is not a real issue. It creates a base that we can build the things we want to do on that. For example, if you come back from work every day at 5 it would be easy for you to say ok, I need that book and tomorrow I’ll go to the bookstore and buy it after work. In this case having a routine to leave work at 5 creates a basis that you can hang some other tasks on it, and most certainly it would be done. But if you don’t have a routine, you don’t know where you can put that task. This uncertainty makes it harder to do it and delays it day after day. Another thing is that we all want to do stuff that we know that we should regularly, read books, exercise, write journal, meditate and some other things that we have concluded that we should do, but we can’t find the time for them. We always want to exercise regularly someday or read books regularly, but its regularity fades away after a short time and leaves us with half read books and a stack of books that you have bought, hoping to read them someday. These things where some of my problems which after reading the book 5am club by Robbin Sharma decided to implement its recommendations and practices and now here is the routine that worked for me.
1- Waking up early
It's a repeated advice for making good habits, in these days the majority of people tend to sleep late and wake up later in the morning, that makes early mornings noise free, peaceful and suitable for a nice start with mediation and thinking for the ones who get up before the sunrise.
One behavior I have witnessed is people tend to end their work at a certain time regardless of when they started. Say you come to office every day at 8 and leave at 5 so let’s say in a day you come to office at 10 and decide to leave at 7 instead of 5. But after 5 you feel like you're working extra hours and you feel that you should not press that hard despite you’re not doing anything more than the other days. It’s our brain which forgets our start time but expects our end time to be the same. So late come and late go does not equal to every day come and go but it’s gives us the illusion that it’s the same or even more.
But you don’t experience such thing when you start early.
Every hour you wake up earlier is an additional hour you stack upon your existing 24.
2- Exercise
It's said that it causes serotonin release in blood and makes you happier overall. It’s one of the hard things when you’re building the habit of waking up early and having a victorious routine. If I miss a few days, I will decrease the intensity of the exercises to make it easier and use less motivation to start it again. It’s very important to the overall quality of the day.
3- Journaling
Journaling about the things that are circulating in my mind makes them less painful and clears my thoughts about what I’m going to do about them. It’s a prerequisite for the next step that without it, it’s more difficult to practice. I have set a minimum of 10 lines for it.
4- Meditation
Meditating is one of the activities that helps to improve our focus and is the reverse practice that we do by scrolling through social media. In social media we exercise scattering our attention, not focusing on any subject for more than a few seconds. Meditation in contrast makes us do the opposite. And it’s the opposite that has value in our time. In this age anything of value requires a good amount of focus and as Cal Newport have put it deep work.
5- Reading books
We usually have a stack of the books we want to read someday but usually they stay in the stack for months and years without getting out of it. A routine for reading creates a line to dequeue from the queue and we can add to our queue later without the feeling guilty about buying another book.
6- Writing blog
We don’t just need to consume knowledge we should be able to process the knowledge we get and produce new knowledge then transfer it to other people too. The act of transferring knowledge and ideas is a critical strength, because without it we can't persuade the others to help us and be with us. And most of the exceptional things need to be done with the help of other people. Writing is the art of thinking clearly and transfer it to others.
7- Plan the day ahead
Planning the day ahead can actually reduce our stress and shape our days better. It never goes as planned but keeping our minds on the things we want and that we think that are important helps us to have a more fruitful day after all. And better response to problems that rise unexpectedly during the day.