Design Your Ideal Day: The Core of Happiful
If you want to live your Ideal Life, you start with designing your Ideal Day. That’s the heart of the Happiful approach: designing the structure of a single day that, if repeated consistently, leads to greater health, happiness, and success.
What is the Ideal Day Protocol?
The Ideal Day Protocol (IDP) is your personal blueprint. It captures the actions, habits, and routines you want to live out each day, from morning through evening, that support your values, health, relationships, and goals.
Your Ideal Day includes three key parts:
Morning Routine – The way you start your day sets the tone for everything else.
Daily Actions – The vital few activities that keep you moving toward your goals.
Daily Shutdown Routine – How you close your day, reset, and prepare for tomorrow.
Why Create an Ideal Day Checklist?
It’s important to know what you want your Ideal Day to look like, but it’s another thing to actually live it. That’s where the Ideal Day Checklist (IDC) comes in. Checklists are the simple, proven technique to keep you on track. We give you a free template, which you will edit to create your own personal IDC.
The IDC makes living your Ideal Day simple. Each week, you print out your IDC and then just follow it every day. This physical checklist ensures you stick to your selected habits and activities. Some days you may be too scheduled to do everything, but just aim to get as close as possible to your Ideal Day. (Doing a mini-version of parts of your normal routine is far better than skipping those elements altogether.) Over time, you’ll string together more and more Ideal Days. Those turn into Ideal Weeks, which become Ideal Months, and before long, you’ll be living your Ideal Life.
Personal Example: My Ideal Day Checklist
To make this real, here’s a look at a few items from my own IDC:
Morning Routine: I start with a smile, a gratitude review, and an input-free sunrise walk where I speak out loud my Values, my 2025 Goals, and my affirmations. I do some visualization (of key parts of the coming day and of my Vision of my Ideal Life), a series of stretching, some breathwork and meditation.
Daily Activities: I include a dedicated two-hour Happiful work block, at least 30 minutes of cardio, a bit of upper body, core, and lower body strength work, something from my personal Happy List, and reaching out to a friend or family member. Of course, there is always more I do during the day, but I strive to include all of these in every day.
Daily Shutdown: At the end of my scheduled workday, I close out my Happiful Planner from today, fill out my Planner for tomorrow, turn off my computer and put my phone in my drawer. That boundary ensures I am present with my family and don’t allow work to seep over into my evening.
The Core of Happiful
This one concept of designing your Ideal Day and living it through the IDC is really the foundation of the entire Happiful program. It allows you to bring together everything we teach: mindset, planning, productivity, health, and happiness. If you design yours, print it out each week, and follow it each day, you’re no longer leaving your life up to chance. You’re intentionally creating the future you want, one day at a time.
Download the template now, and edit it to create your own Ideal Day Checklist.
