You are your habits

All my life I have been a creature of habit. I remember waking up at 5:00am for school that started at 8:00am from the time I was in 4th grade.

I would even watch the news lol. It felt good to get a jump start on the day.

Then in high school I played football which was pretty much a year-round sport and had a structured schedule to the n^th degree.

College made my routine shift to accomodate friends and fun. When I wasn’t pulling 8-12 hour shifts in the library, working 20-30hrs a week at Discount Tire and whatever campus job I had at the time, I was going out with my friends.

This was structured, somewhat, but significantly different from highschool.

Then after graduating and taking a job as the Dir. of Marketing & Product Development for a family friend I have less structure than what I’m used to.  My boss gave his employees the ability to be creative with their schedules which works pretty well. However, I’m used to a more structured work environment.

For the last year and a half I’ve let myself take advantage of not having the structure I crave and it hasn’t been great for my routine. Or for me.

I realized this in the past few months, so I made an outline of my day on my small white board:

Personal projects (i.e. this blog) 5:30am – 8:30am

Work 9:00am – 5:00pm

Yoga 6:00pm – 7:15pm

Misc. 7:30am – 10:30pm

Today was my first day toying with this idea and it went decently well. I had a pretty darn productive day. Productivity at my job is the deciding factor as to whether or not I had a good day, usually. So this was great.

I’m anxious to see if I will stick to it and if it will yield the results and happiness I think it could.

I guess we’ll find out.

Tl:dr

Its important to maintain a routine, if being productive is important to you, the way it is to me