Hacking Daily Routine for Time Management

Daily Routine is a go-to for time management and keeping track of self but hacking daily routine for time management is something you ought to do for the purpose of proper drive. In traditional daily routine, it’s often time vs. activity i.e. activity is matched with certain time with fixture.

Traditional Daily Routine

7:00AM => Wake up
7:00-7:30AM => Freshen up
7:30-8:00AM => Exercise
8:00-8:30AM => Meditate
... and so on.

While this approach is okay to start with, I felt a major defect in the system. I tried to schedule my day in similar manner but the first day after planning I woke up at 7:45AM which was 45 mins after the targeted time. This left me depressed and not continuing or finishing up with the schedule. It’s not that I quit at the very first day, I tried for a week but minor delays was somehow affecting the whole flow.

After watching myself suffer with schedule which in alternative should be helping me, I started thinking that the time was not and should not be more important than my mental calmness, the sense of satisfaction. Hence, the alternative approach I came up with was valuing tasks based on the time it would take rather than fixed time frame.

Hacked Daily Routine

With that change the schedule came to be something like this:

Freshen Up => 30 Mins
Exercise => 30 Mins
Meditate => 30 Mins
... and so on.

Well, yeah! This doesn’t look much different approach then the earlier version but the feeling is lot more different. Wake up 10 minutes, 30 minutes or 40 minutes late than you planned to and still get the things done as you need to, feeling happy as a seal and getting the sense of achievement. No depression, no feeling bad, and not that much of rush either.

This is the hack I came up for my daily routine to do better time management yet being happy. Further, I divided the chunks into every morning, every evening and every night. Then wrote the sum of time the activities each division would take. Tie it up with Pomodoro Technique, and you should be catching up with Productivity Drive in no time.

Below is the picture of how my wall is framed with these activities, time and it’s division.

Hope this helps you as a life hacker and would love to hear your feedback on the approach and if you have better ideas and/or suggestion since I believe that Learning is Endless.