Which routines and rituals help me get more done each day?

Having a specific set of activities that you complete at certain milestones in your day makes an epic difference to your productivity and well-being

Transcript

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Hello, lovely recovering perfectionists. It's Claire Riley, and you're listening to episode 76 of the Recovering Perfectionist podcast. Today I'm going to talk about my two favourite rituals of the day, which help me be more aligned and focused and productive every day. You can head over to clairey.co forward slash pod forward slash seventy-six to grab the key takeaways and links. And let's jump in. This is the Recovering Perfectionist Podcast, and I'm your host, Claire Riley. Alrighty, so I am a massive stickler for ritual and ceremony and consistency for the sustainability and the alignment of my business. Every time that I get to a point where I'm feeling overwhelmed, unproductive, not sure where to go, not sure what to do, feeling a bit discompobulated, all of those sort of things that we're all too familiar with. When I do a bit of reflection and like, what's going wrong? Why has everything kind of, why does it feel like everything's kind of fallen over? Often it's because I've stopped doing one or both of these rituals. So I want to go through them. I'm going to go through what my rituals are, and this is absolutely not a cookie-cutter design. I'm just going to give you some ideas and I'll also throw in a few things that I see work really well for other people as well. But my my what I would love you to take away from today's episode is that you can design your own rituals in the same sort of shape or form as I do and as a lot of people do. But this is a build your own kind of a situation. This is totally a make your own sandwich system process and you can put whatever feels good in there. And I would recommend, I'll come back to this again at the end, but I would recommend that whatever you pull together, that you jot it down so that every beginning of your work session and the end of your work session, you do these as a bit of a checklist thing. But don't set it in stone. You might find that you do something for a few weeks and it's not working for you, and you might delete that, or you might find like this makes a really big difference, so you're going to do more of that. You might hear about other things that other people are doing as part of their beginning and end of work session routines and rituals that you might want to incorporate. That's totally fine. This is not set in concrete. This is a completely dynamic thing, but whatever you choose to start with, try and stick with it for two to four weeks to begin with because it's all about changing your habits and getting into a really nice, sustainable, consistent kind of process. Cool. So let's jump in. So as I've mentioned, the two rituals and routines that I'm going to talk about is your beginning of work session and your end of work session. For most people, this looks like morning and afternoon. Sometimes it doesn't, sometimes we start in the afternoon and we finish in the night, and sometimes people are burning the candle and they're starting at night and finishing in the morning. Whatever you're doing, I'm just going to call it morning and afternoon for argument's sake, but whatever applies to you is completely fine. So I'm actually going to talk about the end of day process before I talk about the beginning of the day, because to me, the end of day is actually part of the next morning sequence, the next morning routine, and I'll tell you why in a second. So at the end of my work session, whether that is at midday or five o'clock or 10 o'clock at night, whenever I am consciously finishing up work and I'm not going to spend any more mental or emotional or physical practical effort and energy and time doing work, that is when I do these things here. So the first thing that I try and do is reflect on what I've already done. I use Asana pretty religiously in terms of my to-do list and managing my workflow for the day. But usually during the day, I also jot down my top three to five tasks that I need to get done today with pen and paper. I find it always I just connect it better, I process it a little bit better for whatever reason. Pen and paper, it just feels really great to me. And it makes it really easy at the end of the day so that I can reflect on what I've actually gotten done. And did I get as much done as I thought? Have I still got things left over? Did I get everything and more done? I'm also one of those people who, if I do something that's not on the list, I write it on the list so I can tick it off the list. I'm a professional Virgo for a reason. But I like to reflect. Part of that, what comes with that is also celebrating. So sometimes I'll have done something, I'll either message a bit's bestie and be like, hey, I finally finished that XYZ that I've been working on, or um, you know, anything like that, or even just give myself a bit of a, huh, yeah, that's done, excellent. Um, and make myself, you know, pause for that thing. I've talked in a previous episode about one of the things that we don't do enough of in our business is pause for celebration and reflection. And when we work in a big team, we often have our teammates or our boss giving us a pat on the back or some feedback, or at least there's a closure of a project or a closure of a task. And that is really great for our mental capacity because it's literally it's ticked off, it's done, it's moved on, so we've got space for whatever is coming next. When we work for ourselves, we don't tend to be so great at that. So it's definitely a big part of something that you can work in to your end-of-day routine. The next bit, and probably the most important, is planning the next day. There is nothing worse, in my humble opinion, than getting started in the next morning and having to get into the mental space, not only of working today, but also trying to remember what did we do yesterday, what were the priorities, what were the things that came up yesterday that I needed to do today. If you don't do that while you're still in it today, it can be really hard and take a much longer time the next day or the next work session, which often isn't the next day, to jump back into it. So planning for tomorrow, today while you're still in it, is so much more helpful so that when you come and sit down tomorrow or next week or whenever the next work session is for your business, you're just getting straight into it. You know exactly what needs to be done, you know, all of that sort of thing. It makes it a lot easier for you and it doesn't take up all of that extra mental energy unnecessarily. So planning for tomorrow, today, number one tip. The last thing is to close and put away. So if there's an option for you to have something that signals to yourself and perhaps those people around you as well in your home, if you're working from home, that you are done for the day, this is a really beautiful way to start to sort of shut down and relax and get into your shoes off mode, you know, into your um back into your personal life, works at work and homes at home, and trying to kind of compartmentalize those things. It can be as simple as closing your laptop. It might also mean decluttering some things. For me, I've got a really small place at the moment, so I work at my kitchen table. I need the kitchen table to feed my children dinner. So there's a pretty no-brainer I have to shut everything down and put everything away so that it looks like a kitchen table again and not like a desk. But that really is a great signal to my brain and to me and to everyone around. Work's done, we're into home home mode now, and that's a really nice closing out ritual, just as you would leave an office and lock the door behind you or turn your computer off or whatever it is, all of those sort of things. Having some physical, practical, tangible ways to signal to yourself that everything's done is really, really helpful. So those are the four main components of my end-of-day ritual and routine. Jumping into the beginning of the day routine, this is one of the things, as I mentioned before, when I have those moments where everything just feels a bit, it's almost always because I've let slip some of my beginning of day morning routine and rituals. So the things that are included in my beginning of the day rituals when I am onto it, and I've literally I'm recording this episode right now because I have let it slide for the last little while and I've come back to my list that's always been there. I've just ignored it for a little while. Um, and I know that it just makes me, it just gives me half an hour to an hour every single morning that I'm working to slip into it, to really feel into the day, to be grounded in my my focus and what I'm supposed to be doing. So there's a couple of elements that I love to do. The first one is around grounding myself and around getting into the mode. Um, for a lot of us, uh, we have kids or we have a heap of other stuff that has to be done in the morning before we even get to sit down in the business. For me, I've got two little kids, I'm a single parent, um, and so getting them up and ready and dressed and breakfasted and lunches made and off to school and all the other myriad of things that come up during the day. I feel like I've already done a whole day's work by nine o'clock. So between nine and ten is my time to really get back into it and to ground in. Some of the things I love to do with that is either a yoga or stretching session, which I just watch on YouTube. I love, love, love, love, love listening to guided meditations, usually around 10 to 15 minutes in the morning, which can be on any topic. Um, I love to use Insight Timer or something like that for those. And it really just uh, you know, sometimes it has to do with business, usually it doesn't, but it's just for me, it's signalling right, everything that's happened in the morning and you know, at other times is compartmentalized over there. And now I'm ready to start my day that's about me and what I need to focus on and what I need to know and think and feel and do in my body and in myself in order to have the best day possible. So, whatever that looks like for you, you can chop and change and choose your own adventure with this one. Absolutely something that signals to you that this is now end of that chapter, beginning of this chapter for the day for at least the next however many hours you're planning on working that day. It's a really great mindset tool as well. The next thing I love to do is track my income from the previous day. So this is something that I have done on and off, probably for about the last four or five years. I absolutely love using Tash Corbyn's 50 pages of colour and I track my income every single month. I also track some other business activities and I track personal goals that way, and it just works absolute wonders. I really, really love it. Um, and the the months that I find that things drop off a little bit income-wise are the months that I stop tracking because you get what you measure, right? So if I'm not measuring it, I'm not working on it, and I'm not consciously um working on growing my business or on being um open to receiving income and that sort of thing. So I track my income every single day. The next thing I do is captain's orders, which is similar to journaling. I'm personally not much of a journaler. I don't, I just that's not my not my scene, it's not my disco, ain't my disco. Um, but I love captain's orders, which um I won't go into too much detail, but it's basically training your brain with sort of affirmations. So you're doing statements over and over again as if they've already happened, um, and your brain or your subconscious sort of goes to work to try and get to you to the point of that being the truth, which is really cool. So I love doing my captain's orders every morning. Um, ideally, you do the same or roughly the same for about 90 days. I've only made it to 90 days once, but I often make it to 60 days, and then I forget a day and I start back at day one. So I think I've probably done about 400 days altogether, but only one stint of actually making it to 90 days. Um, so but I really, really do love that. The next thing I do is my emails and messages, and I try and get too close to ground zero as I can. Um, but this is where I make sure that I've replied to all the emails I need to reply to or actioned anything from those emails. Sometimes that means forwarding it onto my team to file things, sometimes it means taking some other sort of action, maybe setting up an invoice or fixing something or checking something. Sometimes it might mean booking in something, whatever, but I try and make sure that I'm pretty much back to zero in my inbox by the time that I actually start work after this morning routine. Um, and the same with messages. I do often get messages from clients or prospective clients or just biz people or whatever after hours when I don't work. And I used to feel really obligated, like I had to quickly reply, even if it's eight or nine o'clock at night. Um, but now that I know I've got this in my system in my beginning of the day routine, they just sit there and wait because I know that when I open up my laptop for the next workday, that will be one of the things that absolutely gets replied to and gets done. So replying to emails and messages is a really big one there. And then finally, this is um the last thing that I like to do before I kind of get started with anything else with uh client work or anything like that, and that is to post on social media. And what this does, number one, is that it means that I don't um I don't let that task get too big. So um, as we all have a tendency with social media that you go in to do a quick job, but it ends up being how much it may ends up taking a lot longer than you'd like it to. Social media tends to be one of those things. So if I do it in that hour that I've already gifted myself for my beginning of the day ritual and routine, I know that I've got to have it finished by 11 o'clock or 10 o'clock or whatever it is, whenever that hour finishes. So doing my social media posting in uh Facebook groups, on Instagram, and sometimes on my page as well forms part of my beginning of the day. So for me, those are some of the things that when I can tick off all three or all five of those things in the morning, sometimes it takes half an hour, sometimes it takes an hour, but I've gifted myself that entire hour to really settle in. The days that I do that, I'm much more productive for the rest of my workday. The days that I don't do that, I often feel a bit like I haven't quite started and I'm likely to sit down and start doing some work and then I get up and go and make another cup of coffee or I go and make a phone call or I have to suddenly empty the dishwasher or something like that, because I haven't signalled to myself and to my brain, right, beginning of work session. So I hope that's been helpful. There are so many elements that you can put in here, and like I said, this is a design your own sort of a situation. You don't have to copy mine or anybody else's. But if there's some things that you would like to start trying and putting into your daily uh beginning andor end of your day routine and ritual, jot them down so that you can do them consistently. Do them consistently for a couple of weeks before you decide whether it is or isn't working. It does definitely take a bit of a switch of the brain to get into the right gear and to turn it into a habit and to not have that resistance, like, no, this isn't what we do, you know, all of that sort of thing. So don't just try it for one day and be like, nope, not for me. Try it for a couple of weeks and get into that nice rhythm. But do absolutely give yourself permission to chop and change it as you need as well. Hope that's been helpful. I would love to know if there's anything else in your daily routines that helps you to stay focused and grounded and productive, or if this has been helpful, let me know as well. Bye for now.