Routines & Habits Roll Call

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Its a friday lol I’m curious as to what everyone’s day/evening/night look like?

I’ve been following this website My morning routine https://mymorningroutine.com/ for years and I love learning and adopting from the routines posted there. Right now i’m good on morning/night routine but I realize i need to adapt a better evening routine (define as when i get off from work - before bedtime)

Morning Routine - I wake around 6am NLT 7

  • Water w/ ACV + lemons
  • Meditation 10-15 mins first thing
  • Light meal prep - smoothies/make tea (all to go)
  • Get dressed for work - sometimes Ill listen to music of motivational podcast on the speaker
  • Take the subway to work (30 min commute)- I use airtable as a daily productivity log so I start my entry on the train its like how many hours did i Sleep, what my plans for the day, after starting this I’ll read or listen to music
  • Work - I have typical 9-5 day job but I’m normally listening to Youtube or Podcast in the background; I try to get out and take 2 good 10 min walks while the weather is nice; can get pretty cold here in Washington DC; also I’m big on mindful meditation so one of those walks I’m using an app and listening to guided affirmations
  • I use DUE app to set checkpoints in my day so around 12 I open airtable and do a mid-day review; which I like bc if my morning was messy I feel like its a quick reset button to guide me into better control for my afternoon
  • Before leaving work around 5 I close my log and map out planned work for tomorrow
  • Subway ride home - I log my mood and do a dayone journal entry

Evening varies some days gym/cooking /dinner but I would like be firmer with myself to use free-time for work on side projects instead of watching on-line tv. No kids just me so I def have the time available. Using language from the Now Habit book… I’m reconstruction my routine, cue and reward for evenings…

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2

There are connotations to Netflix and chill :slight_smile:

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3

I bet she knows that!

4

So I’ve never come across Airtable before. Wow! Thanks for mentioning it. Just downloaded it. Looks good - like a friendly database.

What other things do you use it for? Using it long?

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:speak_no_evil:

actually i didn’t!! guess I’m old i had that slang wrong i legit edited my post too Lol don’t want my mpu reputation to be trash :rofl:

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I bet I’m a lot older than you are, But… I’m constantly around university students, so… :smiley:

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I check things on urban dictionary quite often, just in case.

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I’m usually groggy in the morning, so the night before I try to set myself up for the next day by deciding on things most needed to be done, usually making a very short list. Then I wake up and basically follow orders from my earlier, more focused self.

I am also regularly reminded of the advice Steve Jobs gave 13 years ago at a Stanford U commencement address:

For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning
and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I
want to do what I am about to do today?”

And whenever the answer has been no for too many days in
a row, I know I need to change something.

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9

I’ve been using a kind of modified version of the 5 Minute Journal that I learned about from Tim Ferriss, and a bit mashed up with the Productivity Planner from the same company.

I need to work on the spacing a bit, but this is a template page I use in GoodNotes to start and end the day. What I’ve learned of late, and part of the impetus for designing my own page, is that Tasks don’t necessarily lead to Progress, so these are separate. For me, progress means work on my research towards my PhD, tasks are other things that don’t move me forward toward that goal. For example, mowing the lawn, teaching a lab, etc.

Ideally, I would print my own planner, taking inspiration from the Passion Planner, which has a good framework for breaking down long range goals into smaller milestones. The pages for daily scheduling don’t work for me, and I would replace them with pages like this one that I’ve designed.

Journal

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10

I like this and thanks for starting the thread.
I’m pretty predictable in my routine but that doesn’t assume effective.

I’m on 3 month’s leave after surgery and while the time off is great, it doesn’t always help with a disciplined routine. I’ll have to develop something as I get back to work.

I like the ACV first thing and that’d really wake you up! :smiley: I have it with meals generally and with sparkling water - helps me thinking it’s just apple cider. Might try the lemon as well.

I do have a similar process (when working) of planning my week and then days to work on accomplishments rather than just tasks and doing. I generally get 7/10 things done that I plan if I am specific in the planning.

I’ll have to review this to make the most of my time. Thanks again! :slight_smile:

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11

I know I’m not the OP, but my wife and I used AirTable to coordinate a recent, multi-stage move (along with a shared task manager).

We had a “base” for contacting service providers (storage, vehicle storage, moving, etc), among a few others. This wasn’t a particularly heavily used base but it was helpful to keep track of who existed, who we already contact, what their rates were, etc. We really only used this over a couple days before we had all this coordinated .

Our most heavily-used Base was our moving inventory base. Moving house is a big job, and we had some of our stuff going directly to storage in our eventual new city, and other stuff coming with us to where we would live temporarily for several months. Even if everything was going to just one location, we’d have used Airtable, but since we had stuff going in two directions, it was especially helpful.

This base was pretty big. We had several tables in this base:
Table 1. Box number
Table 2. Individual Item
Table 3. Category/Location

Each box was assigned a number which was immediately written on the box. Every time an item was added to a box physically, it was added to the box in Airtable.

So each record in Table 1 was a Box. Each box had:

  • A list of items it contains
  • Whether the box was filled or not (unfilled boxes could receive more items, filled boxes were taped up)
  • Notes (for anything that might not fit in the other properties)
  • Category or categories: boxes were assigned basic room categories, and could have multiple. Most critically, it indicated which items were coming with us to our temporary location.
  • An “essential” attribute for boxes that should be unpacked first.
  • Whether the box has been unpacked or not.

On the move-out side:

it meant that we could easily keep track of boxes that still had room because we knew which boxes were filled and which weren’t.

We also didn’t have to concern ourselves too religiously with ensuring that a box contained only one room’s items, since items were individually searchable and boxes could be assigned multiple categories.

It meant we could easily keep track of which boxes were going to storage in our new city, and which were coming with us, very easily, since everything was being packed simultaneously. Things coming with us were pretty mission-critical (hence them coming with us to our temporary location!) so it was important none of them ended up in storage in another country for months!

We could create custom filters/sorts so we could easily see only unpacked boxes, only boxes going to storage/with us, etc. So if you’ve got a few odd items that don’t need their own box, just switch to the view showing boxes that are still open.

On the move-in side

We knew exactly which items were already in our new location and which were with us.

We knew exactly whic boxes to separate and unpack first (the “essential” property) and could set up a view for only those boxes.

If we were looking for a specific item (Where are the dish towels? Where’s that scarf I like? Spare tooth brush?) we could just search for individual items and have the specific box returned.

We could limit our view to only boxes that had yet to be unpacked, so we didn’t have to deal with records for boxes that were already empty.

Currently, we still have a fair number of stil-packed boxes, and if we ever find ourselves looking for something we swear we had unpacked, we can just do a search of Airtable and find out for sure – often items like this are still in some strange box we hadn’t unpacked, but we know EXACTLY which one and can find it immediately!

Airtable was a complete lifesaver!

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12

Morning:

  1. Get up on alarm (I use AutoWake on Apple Watch for smart alarm)
  2. Check phone notifications, just not in bed, and no passive checking any feeds of any kind - just clear out notifications.
  3. Measure body weight on smart scale + drink water.
  4. 10 min of meditation/mindfulness with Headspace.
  5. Some form of exercise (sometimes running, sometimes gym, sometimes a short 6 min workout in own room)
  6. Cold shower.
  7. Breakfast.

Day

  1. No checking iPhone at all until noon. Both iPhone/Mac on Do Not Disturb (actually Mac is in Focus mode). All todos and time tracking are done via Apple Watch.
  2. Always work on the 1 single most important task, resisting all tangents along the way for at least 1 hour.

Evening

  1. Put out clothes for next day.
  2. Plan day tomorrow (1 most important task + check calendar + sometimes time blocking)
  3. Teeth: brush+floss
  4. Write diary in DayOne.
  5. Go to sleep midnight at the very latest, only exceptions when extraordinary work pressure or social events, but not without good reason.

That’s pretty much it. Those are the sets of rules / routines I’ve converged upon after lots of trial and error.

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i don’t have an example nearly as complex as another poster - right now just daily log
but i envision using it for tracking other things just haven’t had the time to play around with it

i believe federicco mentioned using air table to catalog their automation/siri-shortcut stuff

plus with air table there ALOT of templates and examples that you can update to make your own custom DBs

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14

For routines, I’m considering using a checklist in either Omnifocus or Drafts.Thiughts?

15

Hello fellow DCer :slight_smile:

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How about one of the apps specficall dedicated to maintaining (and reminding, if desired) routines? Lifehacker and Sweet Setup, for example, draw attention to Productive:

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I found I couldn’t stand having my habits co-mingled w/ my task manager app

for habit tracking I use HABITICA (we have a cool Gtd party if anyone plays) and STRIDES

also some habit that are checklist based I store in analyst

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I tried a few of those apps. Some seemed quite nice, but they didn’t work for me personally. I think I briefly tried the app I mentioned above, Productive, as well as Streaks and maybe one or two others … that was maybe 18 months ago.