A few weeks back, I started picking up an old habit I’d left behind.
It goes like this: every morning, I tend to wake up and work my way through a three-page planning document designed to help me frame my to-do list. It started out as a bunch of notes from Todd Henry’s Die Empty, then gradually evolved to include little bits and pieces from other routines I’d trialed (such as this one at the bottom of of Tobias Buckell‘s bullet journal post).
It’s a useful document that walks me through four major areas of focus with dot point prompts to guide my planning: what’s important to me today? What am I trying to change or progress? Who will I talk to and what do I value about them? What are the things that need to be done, and the things I may have forgotten?
It makes for a nice little ritual to work through over coffee, and generally gives me about two pages of detail to guide my activities for the next twenty-four hours. I set it aside when I left office work behind and my focus narrowed, but as I move into the tail end of my PhD, I’m starting to accumulate more focus and split my focus a lot more than I’d like.
Ergo, I’ve busted out the list once more, and started a dedicated notebook I’ve dubbed The Book of Days.
Right at the end of the process there’s time and questions set aside for dreaming: In an ideal world, how would you spend your days? What are the ambitions you’ve let slide lately? What are the things you want to achieve before you leave this earth? What ambition have you need neglecting because you don’t know how to begin?
It’s interesting, answering these questions every day. My ideal day is never consistent, but are both recurring patterns that emerge over time, and weird interjections that crop up when I feel like certain parts of my life has been ignored.
And, slowly, I’m starting to develop a list of dailies. The things that I want to fit into my day, every day, in order to take steps towards the life I’d really like to be living.
- Work on my current creative project
- Write a short burst of words on my thesis/non-fiction process
- Snuggle my partner
- Walk for a half-hour and stretch, to prevent the back pain that’s been creeping up on me as I age.
- Post a little process image over on instagram, and tell a story to go with it.
- Blog about something interesting from my process notes or reading
- Learn something new or refine a process/system so it works a little better
- Write a second of my weekly newsletter, so I don’t have to find an entire block of time to write the full thing on a Tuesday/Wednesday.
- Go out into the world and drink a cup of coffee somewhere interesting, or have an interesting conversation.
- Cook something tasty.
- Do something that may help Brain Jar Press sell more books (because, honestly, I have a number where the press is a success, and right now I’m still building towards it).
Or, if I’m feeling the need to be pithy about it: Make something. Learn something. Love well. Share something with the world and build for the future you want.
Leave any one of those steps out and my life starts feeling a little off-kilter, but get a little done on each and I go to bed feeling like everything is doing okay.