How To Create Your Personal Daily Routine

Yesterday I shared with you why it’s important to have morning and evening routines.

Morning and Evening Routines

For some of you, you know exactly what you need to and want to do and you have no problem prioritizing your list. But, as we all know during the day life gets busy and sometimes we truly just don’t have control of how we spend our day.

However, the early morning and the evening are usually within your control. The question is how much “under control” do you want it to be?

I truly feel as though having a specific routine in the morning and evening helps you as a woman to have more control in your life. Even having a relatively small segment of time in which you do have control will do wonders to boost your morale!

My example yesterday still stands. Imagine our day is a book shelf with bookends. With the bookends in place, everything is upright. Remove the books ends and the books are still on the shelf, but are little slumped and sagging.

So, how do you go about deciding what your routine should be?

What’s Important?

The big question is what is important to you?

• Do you want your morning to be less rushed?
• Do you want your morning to be productive?
• Do you want your morning to be spiritual?

I am not talking about planning out your every minute, but I am suggesting that you reserve a block of time that includes your “routine actions”.

For example, I’m still working full time (which is about 45 to 50 hours a week) along with building a home business. Needless to say, I’m a little busy. It’s important to me to have some tidiness in the house so that I don’t have to spend one day of the weekend doing a huge amount of house cleaning.

I have a morning routine of getting a cup of coffee. For me, that is a no brainer. Even on vacation I enjoy that first cup of coffee as I’m doing my makeup and hair and going about getting ready.

Once I’m finished with the bathroom, I have a habit of cleaning the toilet, spraying down the mirrors to clean them, wiping out the sink and folding the towels to hang neatly. It’s not anything major, but that little bit of a routine helps me to feel as though at least this room that I spend time in every morning is neat and tidy. It’s not that I’m a clean freak, please don’t get me wrong. But, I know that the next morning I go into a tidy bathroom and for me that is important. If for some reason I don’t stick to my routine, it’s no big deal. But, I sure do like waking up and having a clean bathroom.

You may find that your morning routine needs to consist of checking email, or your exercise time. It really is up to you to decide what the actions should consist of. And I’m not talking about scheduling a lot of time either. That little “cleaning spree” I have every morning takes me less than 5 minutes. But it’s something important for me.

Then again, some people have a morning routine that is 2 hours. It may be their mediation time, gym time, etc. Again, it’s purely up to you to decide what is important to you and then blocking that time as YOUR time.

What’s Important?

Once my morning has started at the office I implement my “Alive 5” list. This is a list I compiled after reviewing my day at the end of yesterday. I decided the 5 important things I needed to get done tomorrow before 11am (5 hours after officially starting my day). Some folks call it a daily to-do list.

The problem with to-do lists is that they can get pretty long. I have a master list of things I need to do and am constantly adding to it. But daily, I pull off the 5 highest priority things I need to get done and put it on my Alive 5 list. That’s all I work on during that time. Now, in my case, since I do work in the public sometimes my days are not always my own and I don’t have complete control over everything I do. I’m called into meetings that weren’t on my schedule, emergencies happen on the floor that I need to tend to. In that case, any item I wasn’t able to finish automatically gets moved to my list tomorrow.

Another thing that is important to me is a daily feeling of “accomplishment”. I work on so many long term projects that I had a hard time getting that daily feeling of “accomplishment”. A couple of years ago I came upon a list of simple daily actions that anyone can do and by doing those actions you were accomplishing something positive for your life. I’ve added to the list over the years but I STILL use this list and do something from it daily!! I also write it on my calendar of what I accomplished. It gives me such a warm fuzzy inside to KNOW that I accomplished something each day (yes, it’s those simple pleasures that makes us feel giddy-headed!) You can sign up for the Daily Positive Action list over there on the side.

What do You Value?

Knowing your core values and what you hold dear to your heart is very important. VERY IMPORTANT. It’s absolutely the key, foundation, missing link to knowing your purpose and what you NEED to do each day in order to be fulfilled. Knowing those values, and incorporating those daily values into your life is the critical key coming to the end of your busy day feeling fulfilled.

Your values will change over time. I’m sure when your kids were at home, their care and upbringing were your priorities and value. Family was important and doing everything you could to ensure they were raised as good, wholesome, safe, happy kids was what your life centered around.

Now that the kids have left, you may be wondering “what’s my purpose now?” Let’s face it, you will always be MOM, but being Mom is probably not a full time job any more.

That’s where knowing your values helps you chart your course for your new you.

My journey for values and purpose brought me to one of my new projects of writing a book and exploring my role as an author. This was something I loved as a child, in school, and before having kids. I loved to write and create bible studies. During the “mom” years I sort of put that on the back burner because values and priorities changed.

However, now that I have new time on my hands I have resurrected that love. But, believe me, coming to the point that I NEEDED to resurrect that love was painful. I went through a couple years of anguish before I realized that not incorporating my Value of Creativity into my daily life was killing my spirit.

Now, part of my daily routine includes my Value of Creativity. I’m either working on a book, a blog post, sales page copy, helping others with their copy or ideas…something where I am allowing my creativity with words to flow.

As a little help, I’ve included a link what would be “My Morning and Evening Routine List” that I call Feathering Your Nest Routines. You can click here to see it. I’m just posting it so you can see what you may need to do at first to establish your routines, and that is by Making A List. I know my routine by heart so the only thing I list each day on my calender is my “Alive 5” list.

So, do you think having a Morning and Evening routine is important to you? I would love to hear about your routines!

Hugs and feathers from the nest~~()~~

Kim Steadman is the COOP (Chief Online Operating Person) for The Re-Feathered Nest. A place of encouragement for moms entering the Empty Nest Zone who find they need to RePurpose and ReDesign their lives now that the kids have flown the coop. Kim can be found on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/TheRefeatheredNest and on Google+ at +Kim.