“Truly great creative achievements require hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of work, and we have to make time every single day to put in those hours, wrote Jocelyn K. Glei in 99u’s beautiful book Manage Your Day to Day, Routines help us do this by setting expectations about availability, aligning our workflow with our energy levels, and getting our minds into a regular rhythm of creating.”
But how do you manage to give those required hours when your days are consumed by fanfare and traffics and reactionary works. Productivity is not about putting more hours into the rat-race of mediocrity but to get more done when your hours are limited.
Routine has been a cultural obsession for most accomplished people all around the world. The truth is: your days and hours are numbered but you have got a lot to do. And if you are living in Dhaka where traffic jam kills half of your days managing time and maintaining the level of productivity you need to accomplish your work is a formidable challenge. Unfortunately, we have a culture of downward spiral that is living our days as it comes. It has two apparent consequences: it compromises our productivity and reduces quality of our works.
The Way Out
If you start your day without knowing the direction you almost ruin the day at the start. From the very beginning you need to understand what you want to achieve and what you want to get done. A routine can help you to do that. You need to structure your days to get most out of it.
The good part of having a system for yourself, like routine, is that it gives you a chance to understand yourself and plan accordingly. For most people the level of productivity varies throughout the day. Moreover, as we have problem of Traffic in Dhaka we also need to take that into consideration when planning. To maximize your productivity what you need to do is: build your routine around your most productive hours of the day. Say for examples: if you work best in the morning, schedule your most important work in the morning and schedule rest of your day accordingly.
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Why You Need a Routine
Gretchen Rubin the author of best seller The Happiness Project observes:
We tend to overestimate what we can do in a short period, and underestimate what we can do over a long period, provided we work slowly and consistently. Anthony Trollope, the nineteenth-century writer who managed to be a prolific novelist while also revolutionizing the British postal system, observed, “A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labors it be really daily, will beat the labors of a spasmodic Hercules.” Over the long run, the unglamorous habit of frequency fosters both productivity and creativity.
We always envy successful people around us and wonder how they get their so much work done so smoothly. The open secret behind their success is a routine life. Positive habits and routines can have an immense effect on one’s entrepreneurial efforts and life in general.
You will never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine. – JOHN C. MAXWELL
For starters, maintaining a routine is immensely useful not only because it helps you to accomplish more by saving your time but it also, and makes taking decision simple and easy. This allows the brain to rest. So when that brain has to take an actual decision, you can think more creatively as it is fresher than brains of persons who lead a chaotic life.
Routines can become so automatic that we start performing them without realizing it, so we get done what needs to get done, even when our minds are preoccupied with other things. Thus routines can save a lot of time. Every successful entrepreneur will tell us how precious time is.
Inspiration From Makers
Successful Entrepreneurs lead a very routine life. They all have certain habits that they maintain every day. Bangladeshi entrepreneur Russel Sarder always makes time to read, no matter how chaotic his life becomes. Every day during the business week, he spends one to two hours reading. On weekends he would study up to 10 hours. Based in New York City, his IT training business NetCom Learning has sales of around $10 million per year.
Benjamin Franklin was not just a successful inventor but was a successful entrepreneur as well. He had started with nothing but became wealthy. His brilliant routine that has become prevalent everywhere online tells us a lot about what it takes to make ideas happen.
According to Jack Dorsey, one of the founders Twitter, he puts in an 8-hour day at each company, every day. He has a strict routine that he maintains during the workdays. Each weekday is dedicated to a particular area of the business at his companies.
The only way to do this is to be very disciplined and very practiced– JACK DORSEY
Scott Cullather, CEO of inVNT, a live events agency in New York, always meets with his key support team before the close of business to go over what’s coming up the next day.
We review and forecast what tomorrow is going to look like and how we’re going to get through that,” he says. “It gives us an opportunity to re-prioritize. It also allows us to go to bed at night. Your mind does a lot of work for you while you’re sleeping. You get there the next day and are much more efficient and productive.
This focused approach has helped growth, he says. The company expects sales to rise from $20 million last year to at least $25 million this year.
Final Thought
You need time and practice to achieve extraordinary things. For startup founders days are shorter than what they need. But you can get most out of your days by maximizing your productivity. And a solid routine can help you to be super productive. However, maintaining routine is hard. Many of us even question the importance of having a routine. The secret to getting benefits of your routine is to maintain it with consistency. You have to give it time to germinate good result.
The benefit of following routines is that they ultimately become habits. The time we spend improving our routines is time well spent. Let’s start anew and make most out of your days.
[su_note note_color="#3d9fe3" text_color="#ffffff" radius="9"]Credits: This articles was written by Maeesha and was Edited by Ruhul Kader[/su_note]
