This is part two of a series. If you haven't read part one yet, click here.
I hope you had fun figuring out your waking up routine! Were there any changes to apply or was the routine you already had perfect for you?
As I mentioned in my previous article, your willpower is strongest right after you wake up. As you go through the day, you will make many decisions. Not all of them will be conscious or big decisions, but they are decisions nonetheless. At some point you will encounter ‘decision fatigue’. Essentially, this is your willpower muscle growing tired after having to decide things and making choices throughout the day. The more decisions you make, the more tired you get, and the poorer your subsequent choices will be.
Let’s pause for a second. Think about this morning. Even better: mentally walk through you morning. How many decisions or choices do you make and which decisions are already automatic? For example, do you need to choose whether to drink coffee or tea, or do you grab coffee by default?
If your morning is mostly habitual, that’s great. You’re preserving your mental energy. But I bet there are still some decisions you might be making, albeit subconsciously, such as how to fix your hair, or what clothes and shoes to wear.
The trick here, and this is what gets you to level 2, is to prepare your day the night before. The goal of this level is to lay the foundation of the next day, so the moment you wake up it is clear what you are going to do, wear, and focus on that day. The proverb “behind every successful man there stands a woman” applies here too, with the going to bed routine being the woman.
So, how to decide what to include in your going to bed routine? Have a look at your waking up routine. Are there things that you can do in advance to make it even easier to carry out your routine? Can you, for example, prepare your breakfast the night before?
My going to bed routine looks like this:
Clean kitchen
Brush teeth
Moisturize face
Determine to-do list for tomorrow
Choose tomorrow’s outfit
Choose tomorrow’s podcast episode
Meditate
Journal
Number 1 is the evening counterpart of making my bed in the morning. The kitchen is almost the first thing I see every morning, so I want to be greeted with a clean countertop and a clean sink when I go make breakfast. There have been evenings when I left a dirty pot in the sink because I was too lazy to deal with it before going to bed, and I always regretted it in the morning. So: clean kitchen = happy breakfast.
Number 4 is arguably the most important part of the routine. For those with excellent memory: if you recall point 9 from my waking up ritual, I review the day’s to-do list as a reminder what to focus on, and how it will fit in today's schedule. You can imagine how much valuable thinking power you would lose if you have to determine what you absolutely need to achieve that day + assess how much time you have for it + muster up the courage to start working. I’ve noticed that even though I call it a ‘review’, I hardly ever change anything about the to-do list. If anything, I utilize the little 30-minute blocks in between meetings even more efficiently because I have a clear vision of what I need to get done that day. Before I started proactively determining my most important tasks, I would just fill those 30-minute blocks with social media.
Back to the evening routine. Choosing tomorrow’s outfit is the activity that I resist the most of this entire list. I deeply prefer to leave it up to what I feel like wearing on the day itself, but on days when indecisive Audrey appears I can spend 30 minutes deciding what to wear and that is such a massive waste of energy. So, I force myself to pick my outfit the night before, and since I am already decision-fatigued at the end of the day I don’t even spend 5 minutes on the decision.
Meditation and journaling are just ways for me to wind down and mentally transition from action-mode to rest-mode. I’ve noticed that usually I’m physically ready to go to sleep, but my mind is still racing and all over the place. So, to quiet down my mind I meditate, and whatever residu is still floating around I write down in my journal to get it out of my system.
To wrap it up: while your waking up routine will help you launch your day, the preparations for that day are foundational. I strongly recommend to perform those preparations the night before to avoid spending all of your decision-making energy in the first hour of the day. As with the morning routine, you probably won’t find the perfect evening routine right away. It took me a while to realize that my mind needed to get ready for bed as well. And it’s not like my mind has teeth I can brush or a body I can put pajamas on, so I had to find another way for my mind to feel it was bedtime.
Perhaps a whole routine is not necessary for you. If that’s the case, I still do encourage you to experiment with determining tomorrow’s to-do list. Just for a week. I’m curious to how you experience the morning if you have the list ready. Feel free to let me know how any of my tips and recommendations work out for you!
I have broken up this article into a series of four parts, one for each level.
Stay tuned for level 3!
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