productivity

Since I’m starting a new 100-day challenge today, I need to also change up my daily routine in order to fit daily blogging into my schedule. So I thought that we could start by looking at why it’s better to have a routine for your workday, especially when you work at home and have multiple things that have to get done in a day.

I’ve always been pretty resistant to the idea of a routine, but I know that when I have a reasonably set schedule it’s a lot easier to get everything done. When I wake up without a clear idea of what I’m going to do, I have a nice relaxing breakfast, read a little, and maybe if I’m lucky, I get to work by about noon.

The truth is, whether we want to accept it or not, we are hard-wired to have a daily routine. We like to eat at certain times, sleep at certain times, and work at certain times. When your work requires you to be creative, it’s easy to let that last one slide and have work overpower everything else in your life.

And this causes stress and overwhelm because we’re always rushing from one thing to the next. Or spending so much time on the creative part of our work, everything else falls by the wayside.

Having a Routine Allows You To Make Better Business Predictions

Having a routine allows you to predict your day, at least to a certain extent.

A daily routine lets you plan your day in a way that makes the best use of your time for you and your business. Having a schedule also makes it easier to predict income and expenses too, especially if you do client work. Setting up your schedule to have set billable hours means you know roughly what kind of income you are looking at for the month.

When you know what kind of money you have coming in, you take a huge load of stress off your plate too.

Your Routine Doesn’t Have To Be Overly Complicated

Planning your day and creating routines gives you the space and the freedom to make good choices every day.

Your schedule doesn’t have to be overly complicated. For example, my daily schedule looks a little like this:

Morning – Creative work (journal and coloring kit production)
Walk the dog
Afternoon – Networking, me-time
Walk the dog
Evening – Blogging and Technical Stuff

The actual tasks that fit into those time blocks will vary depending on what I have going on. And if there’s deadlines to be met, I can change things around as needed.

It’s also important to remember that the actions you add into your routines should help to make a difference in your business and your life. You should always be working toward a goal of some sort so that you will know when the work you’re doing is producing results, and when it’s time to change things up again.

What Will You Get Out of Setting Up a Workday Routine?

The benefits of creating a workday routine that works for you are many. Here are just a few example of what you can do when you have a routine:

spend more time with family
have more time with friends
decide which work is most important
figure out what to outsource
decide which tasks can be automated
get more done each day
understand what really matters to you
make more money

I don’t know about you, but I kind of like the sound of all of that. Life’s too short to be chained to your computer all day every day just because you’re not working as smart as you could be.

Creating smart routines that work for you is a powerful solution for living your best life, whether you run your own business or work at a job. We are all creatures of habit and once we accept that, it gets a whole lot easier to create healthy habits that allow you to be more productive and more creative.

Do you have a workday routine that helps you be more productive? Share your favorite tips in the comments below.

We all have routines, even when we don’t label them as such. Unless you work in an environment where everyone is mandated to do the same thing at the same time every day, no one person’s routine is going to look the same as another’s.

One trap that many people fall into is thinking that you’re being productive when you’re really focused on busy work that fills up time but doesn’t get you any closer to your goals.

Knowing how you’ve created your work routine and acknowledging whether it works or doesn’t work is the first step in changing your routine so that you can be more productive.

There are several things you can do to analyze your current routine. Here are four ways to get started.

#1 – Journal Your Day

You can’t know what’s working or not working if you don’t actually know what you’re doing. Mindfulness plays a huge part in productivity, and being intentional in your choices really helps.

But before you start to change things, take a week to journal your days so that you can see exactly what you’re doing, when you’re doing it, and any thoughts and feelings you have about it.

Using a bullet journal to do this can really help because of it’s premise of rapid logging… a quick note each time you switch tasks or stop to do something non-work related can give you a really clear picture of how your day flows.

#2 – Be Honest With Yourself

If you really want to create a routine that works for you, you must be honest with yourself.

When you look at your schedule, you need to decide whether what you’re doing is productive and produces results, is busy work, or is just wasting time.

#3 – Pay Attention to Interruptions

If you work from home, it’s natural that there are other things going on in the background. These are important too because they can affect your mindset as well as your time use.

Things to notice include:

What are other family members doing?
What’s on the tv? The radio?
Is your phone always pinging away in the background?
Are your kids and/or dogs pushing for attention?

All of these things can slow you down and play havoc with your schedule, but they’re a normal part of your life and so can not be discounted when planning your new routine.

#4 – How Does Your Day Make You Feel?

I think that one of the biggest reasons we become creative soulpreneurs is because we want to do what we love and make a living from it. We want less stress and more happiness in our lives.

Make sure you record in your journal exactly how your day makes you feel. And then don’t be afraid to change things up or let go of systems and processes that just aren’t working for you.

Without a system that works well for you, it’s hard to not feel stressed, bothered, and just plain cranky about your workday routine. When your workdays make you feel this way, then it starts to feel like just another job instead of the dream business you are trying to build.

Final Thoughts

When it comes right down to it, a routine that works for you is freeing. It feels like you have more time and are getting a lot more done.

So, now that you’ve recorded your week, take some time to look over what you’ve got and decide what works, what doesn’t, what you can change, and what you can let go of.

The idea is to create a new routine or at least tweak the existing one to give you the results you need to achieve the goals you set for yourself and your business.