“I didn't do anything today!" - What? Have you not lived? This is not only the fundamental, but the most illustrious of your occupations. | Michel de Montaigne
What makes a good day?
It's a question I've asked myself many times, but for years, I struggled to find a satisfying answer. I could tell when I was having a bad day, but I couldn't pinpoint what made a good day good. That is, until I started building a routine system 1 year ago. By intentionally including activities that bring me fulfilment, I’ve been able to consistently enjoy good days.
In this piece, I’m sharing the steps I took to build a routine that helps me feel good about my days. I’m also sharing a few tips on how I improved my routine system overtime to feel better everyday. If you’re struggling to have good days, I hope my experience can help you start a routine system of your own.
A daily routine contains the minimum amount of positive things for me to feel good about my day. From experience, I know that doing those things will make me feel better. No matter the circumstances of that particular day, I will feel like “mission accomplished” if I check those items off the list.
My daily routine didn’t appear out of nowhere. Instead I built it gradually over the years. I don’t exactly recall when it all started. I must have been coming out of a long streak of bad days. Maybe at the end of a grinding and cold winter day. Anyway I had a wake-up call a year ago. Suddenly I realized I was not getting the most out of my days. So I decided to do a simple experiment.
At the end of each day, I took 5 minutes to ask myself a series of questions. First thing I asked: how good was the day on a 1 to 10 scale?
Second I made a list of the things I did that day. How did those things contribute to my feeling for that day? Did they have a positive or negative impact? Did they make me feel good or bad?
Finally I sorted the things in two columns “positive” and “negative”. After one week, I reviewed the columns. I highlighted the positive things I knew I could repeat everyday. I kept track of the negative things into a note called bad habits (this is a story for another time).
After one week I had built an outline of my daily routine. I would go on and test the routine for a few weeks trying to make the good things stick. I’ve been updating my daily routine ever since using the same method.
How do you feel when you tick off a task from your to-do list? If you’re like me, you’ll feel an immediate sense of gratification. As humans we are wired that way. Each time our brain recognises a task as completed, it releases a dopamine shot. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that generates feelings of accomplishment and happiness. As I’m going about my day, my brain ticks off the items of my daily routine list. That ticking off mechanism acts on my brain activity to increase my satisfaction level.
I could argue that the content of the items of my daily routine matters less than ticking off mechanism. My brain can’t tell the difference between two items but it can tell when I achieve them. Of course in reality the content of the items matters greatly. Because I’m keeping the items on the list that make me feel good at the end of the day, the act of doing those things is inherently good to me.
The benefit of taking 5 minutes each day to assess what went good or bad is hindsight. Like with many people, hindsight helps me take a better decision than I could ever take in the rush of the moment. It’s a welcomed pause button I press on at the end of each day to steer myself towards the happier version of myself. I like the image of the captain sitting on the deck every night and staring at the faraway stars to stay the course.
My daily routine contains the items I try to do each day because I know they will make me feel good. How does it look in practice? Well, it’s nothing fancy. I’m sharing mine below as an example.
Please keep in mind that my daily routine is personal. I’m doing a bunch of things that you would probably not want to do. And the opposite is true. You are doing things during the day I would find hard to replicate. And that’s fine. Our bodies and minds are all different. It’s a matter of exploring and finding out what’s good for us.