By now you might have realized an ulterior motive behind these blogs. In many of the self-development books and videos that I have encountered, one common and most popular method of being productive is said to be "Accountability". This Blog and my Instagram account are like my accountability platforms.
This blog is on similar lines. This is me documenting my current process in the search for a good, efficient, and long-term system.
Like any normal person, I struggle to stay consistent. With engineering, my internship, and my personal work, it's really easy to get overwhelmed and just drop everything. What's even tougher is to create a long-lasting system. Finding that right balance so that I can stay more consistent.
It's not just working, I even strive to live a healthy life. In the end that is the actual priority. That includes having a healthy sleeping routine. That is going to be given the most importance in the system I am currently building.
WHAT DO WE NEED?
To create a system to stay consistent we need to have two things. First, ORDER. For example, right now I want to create an optimum morning routine. I need to do certain things before I start my day. That is,
Meditate
Journal
Exercise
Read for an hour
Schedule the day
When I wake up and my body is looking for excuses to not get up, I need to be sure what's the first thing I need to do. In my case, I'll stretch a bit and brush my teeth. Usually stretching a bit helps you feel awake. After brushing without a break take out my meditation couch and meditate. So on and so forth. There should be no waiting period between the two tasks. I have faced this problem so many times before. I would brush my teeth and sit on the bed for a minute and somehow it's 3 hours later I am waking up again.
I feel the mornings are the toughest conflicts we can have with our monkey mind!
You conquer that and you are well ahead of the majority!
The second thing that we need is CUE. Cue is basically a signal that we need to do a certain thing. If you have your cue clear it's that much easier to get to the task.
Now, this is the reason I have never been able to have a good morning routine. Because I was really naive thinking that the morning routine starts in the morning. Silly me! never could realize that the morning routine actually begins the night before. The only way I can wake up early is if I sleep on time. If I sleep on time only then I will have quality sleep. If I sleep late the conflict in my head is going to be even worse the next morning.
I had no cue for sleeping early. I would either keep working or watch a movie or something. So there was no signal as such that would tell me " Bro! Go to sleep! It's time!". Have a clear cue that tells you to start the system!
I have personally added alarms for 10:30pm that tells me to switch off all screens. I have asked my parent to remind me about it. I have decided to not start any work at 10 pm that could take me more that 30 mins.
But Amey, The main problem I face is that I am not consistent! How do I deal with that?
I feel like any other tasks, Even being consistent comes with practice. You stay consistent for a while , you miss a few days. But coming back to it is what matters. Coming back to it is what we need to focus on. If you still want to know more, there are actually a few techniques you can read about. I will talk more about it in the coming future. But if you wanna quench your curiosity then read these:
In the next blog I will write about the creative system that I am currently building. I will talk about problems I face while creating content on multiple platforms and how I plan to solve them.
This was a general view and an easy to understand steps to creating a sustainable system/routine. I would highly suggest you read "Atomic Habit" if you are interested in learning more deeper about such topics.
I missed a Sunday tho XD! No worries! Back on track! Thanks for reading!