Regularly evaluate the actions you take as a habit and sift out unnecessary ones.
A good daily routine helps you do what you want to do with minimal stress, using time and energy efficiently. But it may become outdated, too hard or inappropriate. And if you continue to rely on it, the situation will be reversed: stress will rise and productivity will fall.
Our brain is lazy, it always tries to save energy. Therefore, the repetitive actions from the schedule are performed on autopilot.
This becomes dangerous when the autopilot mode captures all spheres of life. As a result, we are always inclined to the usual way of thinking, similar actions and decisions.
In this state, we do not see any new possibilities, we do not invent creative ideas, we do not find optimal variants. Therefore, from time to time we need to get out of the autopilot and evaluate the efficiency of the life order. It should save time and help us to achieve our goals, not the other way around. As Stephen Covey writes in Seven Skills of Highly Effective People, the main thing is to include your priorities in the calendar, rather than prioritize what is already in the calendar.
When too many repetitive tasks appear in the calendar, we stop thinking and evaluating our condition.
We begin to follow the planned thoughtlessly, leaving no room for spontaneous decisions and care for ourselves. In this case, we need to clean up our habits. That is, to check if any of them undermine productivity and good health.
The purpose of such cleaning is to reduce unnecessary repetitive actions. See which ones you do automatically. Don't forget that you have to control your schedule, not your schedule. There are a lot of small things you can do all day or week, but you can't get anywhere near the goal. Don't do them on autopilot unless they're working.
Autopilot is becoming more and more of a problem," says Mark Williamson, head of Action for Happiness, a happiness research organization. - From an evolutionary security mechanism that protects the brain from overload, it has become a basic mode of operation in which we make decisions without accountability. It seeps into all areas of life, depriving us of a sense of control.
If you feel that your daily routine is putting too much pressure on you, it's time to pause and evaluate your habits.
Ask yourself a few questions. Am I usually focused or distracted? Why not? Am I getting closer to my short- and long-term goals? What's stopping me and what's helping me?
Analyze each task and action. Determine which of them can be moved, delegated, broken down or excluded if they do not help to move towards the goals. Try to free up time for what really matters to you. Fight the temptation to take on as many tasks as possible and only add new ones if really necessary.
Conduct such audits regularly and you will always focus on what is important to you. "After each cleanup, you get at least a month, during which you manage to do some serious work on a few projects," says Cal Newport in Digital Minimalism.
It's easy to swing away. When you're busy, it doesn't seem like it's important to take the time to think and get rid of unnecessary tasks from your schedule. But this can be a necessary reboot, after which productivity will increase. Try to do so once a month and notice that less time is wasted.