Simple routines to help busy people maximise health and productivity
Perhaps it's the promise of a fresh start that comes with a new day, or the alluring possibility of maximising your productivity by "squeezing" more hours out of the day while you're feeling freshest and most focused.
Yet how you end your day is just as important as how you start it.
In fact, it's difficult to separate the two — our evening routine can contribute to our quality of sleep, which impacts the following morning and our focus and energy throughout the day.
The difficulty is that creating new routines for ourselves doesn't come naturally to many, irrespective of whether we place a habit in the AM or PM.
Having interviewed hundreds of people about their daily schedules and challenges, common stumbling blocks vary — from scrolling mindlessly on our phones before bed and not getting enough sleep, to pressing the snooze alarm and over-scheduling our calendar.
Personally, when I become frustrated with my own stumbling blocks — again — I tend to want to overhaul my entire daily routine.
As Dr Gina Cleo, a dietician and research fellow at Bond University on the Gold Coast, recently told the ABC, it's advisable to start small.
"When we perform a behaviour over and over again we have these neural pathways in our brain that get stronger so it is easier to perform that habit."
Rather than trying to overhaul your daily routine, here is some inspiration to bookend your days.
Habits to combat sleep
Many of us are sleep procrastinators. The culprit? Our devices
While the amount of sleep people need to feel refreshed may vary, research has found consistency is key for sleep quality. Our body wants us to go to bed and wake up at the same time each day.
Unfortunately, many of us are sleep procrastinators and the culprit is our devices, according to studies by Matthew Walker, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
My habit of scrolling Instagram in bed is a form of sleep procrastination, which causes me to delay my bedtime and consequently hit snooze several times the next morning, only to miss out on starting the day the way I had hoped.
I started with turning on the Night Shift function in my smartphone display settings (the apps f.lux, Iris and Twilight have a similar effect) to dull the alerting effect of blue light.
Next, I reduced the appeal of visual apps such as Instagram by changing the screen settings to greyscale. Then, I moved my phone charger to the other side of my room to avoid in-bed scrolling.
Eventually, I invested in a radio alarm clock so I could keep my phone outside the bedroom entirely.
Develop your own wind-down routine
Experts say we need between 30 minutes and one hour to unwind before going to bed.
In The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Sleep at a Time, Arianna Huffington outlines an ideal "transition to sleep" routine. It includes writing down what you're grateful for, dimming the lights, switching off technology 30 minutes before bed, and taking a warm bath in Epsom salts, before changing into a special nightgown or sleeping T-shirt.
Personally, I found this sequence daunting, and the idea of developing something similar felt like another "'should". Instead, I decided to keep a good thing going and build a wind-down routine that centred on taming my device-induced sleep procrastination.
Before I clean my teeth, I put my phone on its charger in my living room to create a physical separation.
In place of my phone, I now read a book and find myself naturally getting tired and falling asleep mid-paragraph.
On the nights I'm restless or struggling to fall asleep, I find myself instinctively reaching for my phone as a distraction. Instead, to try to relax, I tell myself that resting with my eyes closed is the next best thing to sleeping. Or I decide to do some more reading until I'm tired.
'Eat that frog' each morning
Don't eat this frog, but do eat your I-don't-want-to-do-this-task frog.
Mark Twain once said that if you eat a live frog first thing in the morning, nothing worse will happen to you for the rest of the day.
Popularised by author Brian Tracy, the "eat that frog" habit suggests we tackle our most dreaded task first thing in the morning when we are less susceptible to distractions.
Eating the frog may suit those, like myself, who are prone to procrastination. Completing my most difficult task first up creates a sense of accomplishment and momentum for the rest of the day.
I don't always manage to "eat that frog" every morning. But the days when I do feel as if I've received some kind of bonus.
With the hardest task behind me, I'll reset, shower and attend to tasks that are usually swallowed up by the snooze alarm, before getting to work.
Stick to a broad to-do list
By writing a list in the morning and reflecting on what you accomplished in the evening, to-do lists can provide a great bookend for the day — unless you're susceptible to berating yourself when you don't quite manage to tick everything off an overly-ambitious list.
In Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives, author Tim Harford points to a study in the early 1980s that detailed how daily plans were catastrophically demotivating for undergraduate students, while proving monthly plans effective.
Writing a broad list may help keep to-do-list guilt in check. Harford argues that inevitable distractions often render the daily to-do list ineffective. And leaving room for improvisation in such a list can reap the best results.
Madeleine Dore is a freelance writer and creator of Extraordinary Routines, a project featuring interviews, life-experiments, and articles that explore creativity and human imperfection. She recently founded the Melbourne-based event series Side Project Sessions to help people work on whatever they're putting off.
Originally published on Every day