Living an Ideal Life – Chapter 5 – Daily Decisions

Daily Decisions – The Sum of All its Parts

Each day consists of many binary decisions where we have a choice to be productive or feed instant gratifications. Consciously or not we consistently make these decisions each and every day. And the summation of these decisions builds up to how we spend our day. I like to think that each and every decision is a block, and together they form the story of how we lived today.

Take for example the decisions we are faced with just in our morning routines after waking up:

Morning Decision Blocks

Each of these Yes/No decisions has a separate weight that affects how the rest of our day will go. And to get even more granular, I counted 26(!!) decisions alone I was faced with in the morning when living in NYC.

With so many decisions so early, it’s no wonder it’s tough to have mental clarity sitting down to start the work day. I’ve already gone through 26 (minimum) choices before I’ve even left my apartment!

Now as I set out to examine what an ideal day is for me, let’s deep dive into what an ideal morning looks like to me. First, from the best of my memory I plotted out how I spent my mornings my past year living in NYC. This graph shows the % of days I completed an activity.

Removing rudimentary daily tasks and solely focusing on what I deem productive activities, let’s take a look at my average morning routine vs an ideal morning.

The red activities show what my current morning routine was, and the grey bars detail what an ideal morning would look like to me. On the left side there are 7 activities I want to completely eliminate from my morning routine, which are:

Hit Snooze (Done 100% of mornings)

Check Social Media (Done 100% of mornings)

Text People (Done 100% of mornings)

Check Email (Done 100% of mornings)

Watch TV (Done semi-regularly, eliminate completely)

Buy Breakfast (Done regularly, eliminate completely including buying coffee)

Choose What to Wear (Layout clothes before bed what to wear)

These activities mostly center around checking my phone/computer upon waking up. So by not doing that first thing can help eliminate 3 distractful activities from my morning routine. Hitting snooze has become a staple of the morning routine and is just something that has to be unlearned through repetition. To break the habit cycle some recommendations could be changing ringtone to a pump up song and moving phone charger away from bedside forcing me to stand up and start the day.

Buying breakfast, or at least coffee, was something I commonly did in NYC as I often never left enough time in my sporadic routine to make breakfast. I usually had the makings for an omelette, but not the time or discipline to make one. In this scenario buying was easier than building. Breaking this habit involves incorporating another into the routine (i.e. making breakfast) and is something I’ll tackle later in building routines.

Choosing what to wear is another time sucking decision making activity in the morning. Not only is changing outfits a waste of time since we probably only rotate between 7 outfits anyway, it is a distraction on the mind for a non-essential decision. We are better served focusing on ourselves, mentally, physically, emotionally in the morning rather than focused on routine outfit selections. I don’t disagree though that looking good makes you feel good. Hence why I’m not suggesting eliminating this choice altogether, I feel it’s better tackled the night before when we are winding down, rather than in the morning.

Now, lets focus on the right side of that chart

In total I’ve identified eight activities I want to increase and incorporate into my morning routine.

Six activities here I routinely do on less than 25% of mornings, and two activities I want to incorporate into my morning routine for the first time. One thing we all know is that changing too much all at once will definitely lead us to quit and relapse possibly even worse than we were before. Think about times you’ve tried follow New Years resolutions, diets, or new gym memberships. We often think of these things as quick fixes to life problems when in fact they are lifestyle changes. The activities above aren’t quick fixes to make me better, and then I can relax and regress to my previous form. They have to be considered essential for growth and that’s why such an onus is put on incorporating them into my daily routine.

With that said, there are a lot of different things I want to incorporate and tackle here. But prioritization is needed. So let’s put them in priority I want to incorporate them in regards to their potential payoff and impact to my life:

Activity

 Potential Payoff 

The activities I correlate highly with personal growth and success are all around mindfulness and planning the day out. With this completed first, the rest of the day is organized in our minds and we have clarity on how we plan (hope) the day will turn out. Of course there’s much more next that distracts us from our personal daily goals, but identifying and setting out are the groundworks of daily productivity. So for me the next steps are to build the routine around these 3 cornerstone activities. That have to be completed each day no matter what. No excuses.

After building out a routine, we can layer in additional activities we deem important but we have to have to have to get the routine implemented first. There’s no shortcuts to doing the work here.

As for rudimentary things (i.e. flossing, gelling my hair) they will be incorporated last into the morning routine as they provide the smallest payoff and thus shouldn’t be cornerstone activities to build your day around. Yes I know flossing is important but it’s not going to give you the edge to win the day! I’m also realizing how fortunate I am never having to worry about doing my hair or spending time on makeup, that is definitely activities that need to be planned into a routine.

Next time I will discuss more in-depth on how to build routines. As they are the systems that run our lives, it’s very important we understand the triggers that lead us to do what we do.

Bonus

POTENTIAL DAILY DECISIONS  (26!) – Can you identify anymore? If so email me at bradleyrossman@gmail.com with what I left out of your routines.

Wake Up
Hit Snooze
25 Pushups (x2)
Daily Mindfulness
Write Down your goals for the day
Phone Time –
Check Email
Text People
Check Social Media
Make Bed
Read
Watch TV
Make healthy breakfast
Buy breakfast
Clean Dishes
Listen to Music
Listen to Podcast
Brush Teeth
Shower
Wash/Conditioner hair
Gel hair
Trim Beard
Floss (lol kidding!)
Choose What to Wear
Change out Laundry