Your Real Life vs. Your Ideal Day Protocol

The last few blogs have been about the importance of creating your Ideal Day Protocol and using our free Ideal Day Appto help you stick to your Protocol. 

Now let’s talk about reality.

You can and should create your Ideal Day Protocol – the list of all the things you do on a daily basis to have a great day, broken down into your Morning Routine, Daily Activities, and Daily Shutdown. I have 50 of them on my list. But it’s a rare day I do all 50, and that’s to be expected. That’s why it’s called an “Ideal Day Protocol” and not a “Normal Day Protocol.” So it’s perfectly fine not to check off every activity every day. 

First of all, there are weekends and holidays (or whenever you don’t work) vs. work days. And some work days may be so packed with scheduled meetings that there’s barely time for anything else. There are vacation days. Days you’re traveling. Days you have family or friends visiting. And even on “normal” days, there are some things I don’t plan to do every day: for example, I only do strength training 3 times a week. Finally, you may have things you plan to do only on specific days of the week.

I’ve been telling you about our new (free) Ideal Day App for a few weeks. Let me tell you how the app accounts for all of this.

You begin by setting up and customizing your Ideal Day Protocol. We start you off with some default activities (some of the most important actions from Happiful) separated into your Morning Routine, Daily Activities, and Daily Shutdown. You can toggle off any of these default activities (or delete them entirely), or click Options. Within Options, you can edit the name of the action, choose which days you want to take that action (every day, or select specific days of the week such as every M-F, or just on Tuesdays, etc.), set a weekly goal, or set it as “Non-negotiable”. Non-negotiable is for those activities that you will do every day, no matter what – even on those special days discussed above (vacation, busy days, visitors, etc.). These are so important that you will do them every day, no matter what. Then, as you go through your checklist each day, the Non-negotiables are clearly identified.

You can also add more activities to your Morning Routine, Daily Activities, and Daily Shutdown. When you click “Add action” in a section, you see a list of other actions you might want to include in your Ideal Day Protocol. You can filter these suggestions by category (Health and Fitness, Mindset, etc.) as well as search by keyword.

You can read a short description of the benefits of every item, which can help you to decide which you want to add to your Ideal Day Protocol. 

And, because everyone is different, you can add your own custom actions. 

You can modify your Ideal Day Protocol any time you want, and you can also rearrange the order of the actions within each section. (I find that I keep tweaking my order, as I want the least resistance possible to taking each of these actions, and at least for me, the order makes a difference. Some things just feel better doing them in a certain order. Weird, right?)

I’ve been using and teaching others to create and use an Ideal Day Checklist for at least 15 years, as it is an incredibly powerful tool to keep you on track for everything you want to do each day. In fact, when someone who has gone through my Happiful program later tells me something like, “I started off great, but I’m having trouble sticking to the program”, it’s always really easy to diagnose the problem: they stopped using the Ideal Day Checklist.  

In the early days of Happiful, the Ideal Day Checklist was a spreadsheet to be printed out over the weekend to use the next week. It worked, but it was a little crude. The new, free Ideal Day App is better in every way, allowing you to fully customize your Ideal Day Protocol. And while you can still print it out and use the physical checklist, it’s a web app so you can also use it on your phone or laptop. 

As some of you know, I travel a lot, often for several weeks at a time. On these vacation days, I only do my Non-negotiables. In the old days, this was just a mental construct for me: I “sort of” knew which things off my Protocol I planned to do every day while on vacation. And I didn’t bring several printed copies of my Checklist with me. Without the clarity and the visual reminder, my adherence to my planned Protocol on vacation was spotty. Now, with my Non-negotiables clearly identified and the app letting me use my phone or laptop, my adherence is dramatically improved. 

As John Maxwell said, “You’ll never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret to your success is found in your daily routine.”

The Ideal Day App is the elegant and powerful solution for you. And it’s free. Give it a try and change your life.