Why you want structure, routines, and habits

People often tell me that I have the most willpower and self-discipline of anyone they know. But that’s not true. What is true is that I have implemented a lot of structure and routine in my life and I utilize systems to make sure I follow through on all my desired daily habits and activities.

Whether you want to improve your personal life, advance in your career, or both, mastering structure, routines, and habits is the underlying key. Making meaningful progress in any area of your life becomes much easier when you do so.

When you install structure, routines and habits, their effects will be profound: they reduce stress and help you achieve consistent happiness and success in both your personal and professional life.

A lot of people live in a state of daily chaos. They wake up without a clear plan and immediately go online and check their social media, messages, notifications, and emails. Often, they lose half their day before they ever do anything productive or beneficial. Without structure, routines, and habits, their days are basically random. That’s no way to improve your life or achieve meaningful goals. Life becomes easier, and you become more effective, when you establish structure and build routines that eventually become habits.

Here’s what a structured day looks like:

• Morning Routine: Follow specific daily practices that energize and motivate you, sharpen your focus, and set a positive tone for the day ahead.

• Daily Activities: Identify and take the actions every day that are most important for your personal and professional life.

• Daily Shutdown: Implement an end-of-day routine that helps you prepare for tomorrow, relax, be present, and ensure a great night’s sleep.

You get to decide the specific actions you want to do each day, in each of your Morning Routine, Daily Activities, and Daily Shutdown. When you do that, you have just created what we call your Ideal Day Protocol.

Here’s my own current Ideal Day Protocol: 

Morning Routine:

• Smile (it instantly makes you happy)

• Start 15 minute timer to stand and move (keeps my metabolism from shutting down)

• 90-minute MVP Work Block (MVP=Most Vital Priorities)

• Communication check/exit out after

• Update Journal

• Review Gratitudes on Happiful Planner (I wrote them the day before)

• Review Today’s Happiful Planner (I filled it out the day before)

• Visualization of today (key parts of the day going perfectly)

• Posture (30 seconds of exaggerated good posture)

• Box Breathing

• Check/record body metrics

• Read Hero Bars (my past key life accomplishments to boost confidence)

• Visualization of my ideal life in 5 years

• Stretches/mobility/flexibility

• Input-free walk 

• Recite Values from memory

• Recite Quarterly Rocks from memory

• Recite Affirmations from memory

• Read inspirational quotes

Daily Activities:

• Capture voice notes from walk (I use my Apple Watch voice recorder to capture ideas)

• Personal Development reading

• Pushups, leglifts, and squats

• 30+ minutes of cardio or strength training

• 90-minute MVP Work Block 2

• Activity off my Happy List

• Reach out to a friend

• Reach out to a family member

Daily Shutdown:

• Add today’s new items to task manager

• RAFT emails to empty inbox and exit

• Reflection: Today’s Wins and How I’ll Improve 

• Fill out new Happiful Planner for tomorrow

  • Check tomorrow’s calendar; add to Happiful Planner

  • Check weekly plan for tomorrow’s actions

  • Check task manager for tomorrow’s actions

  • Decide tomorrow’s MVPs

  • Decide tomorrow’s other actions

  • Number tasks in order of importance

  • Plan tomorrow’s meals and exercise

  • Decide family and friend reachouts for tomorrow

  • Gratitude journal

• Computer off by 5 pm

• Phone in Do Not Disturb mode and in drawer by 5 pm

Your Ideal Day Protocol will of course be different (probably very different!). But you should have one. You should know what actions you want to take each day to create your ideal day. 

You should install structure into your life. You should establish your daily routines. You should determine the beneficial habits and actions you want to take each day. 

And then you need a checklist of those actions to ensure that you follow through each day on as many as possible. Without a checklist, you’re relying on memory and willpower and that simply doesn’t work. 

That’s why we created the free Ideal Day App. It guides you through creating your Morning Routine, your Daily Activities, and your Daily Shutdown. It gives you some default actions in each area which you can keep or reject, and lots of suggested actions, taken straight from our various Happiful courses, which you can add if you wish. And you can add your own custom actions to each section.  

You can set an action to be on only specific days of the week (for example, weekdays vs. weekends) and you can identify those that are “Non-Negotiables” – your minimum set of actions for especially busy days, travel days, vacation, etc. You can even set a weekly goal for the number of times you want to take each action, and track how many times you did it that week.

As of this writing, the app is in beta, so come check it out. Create your own Ideal Day Protocol, try following your resulting Ideal Day Checklist for a week, and let me know what you think.