How Routine is YOUR Routine?

Sometimes life is like one big balancing act. Looking for a balance between work, school, and personal time has led me to decide that I need to establish a daily routine. As this is the first time in my adult life that I have had the opportunity to have some sort of routine,I'm struggling. So I'm looking for tips. An old high school friend, Andy, shared an interesting page with me:

Daily Routines is a website, which shares how writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days. What I love about this site is the posts vary from interview excerpts to short articles about a person, to personal anecdotes. Surprisingly, Stephen King's post about his morning routine was my favorite - probably because it sounded most like something I could manage. I've copied and pasted it below, so enjoy!

“There are certain things I do if I sit down to write,” he said. “I have a glass of water or a cup of tea. There’s a certain time I sit down, from 8:00 to 8:30, somewhere within that half hour every morning,” he explained. “I have my vitamin pill and my music, sit in the same seat, and the papers are all arranged in the same places. The cumulative purpose of doing these things the same way every day seems to be a way of saying to the mind, you’re going to be dreaming soon.

“It’s not any different than a bedtime routine,” he continued. “Do you go to bed a different way every night? Is there a certain side you sleep on? I mean I brush my teeth, I wash my hands. Why would anybody wash their hands before they go to bed? I don’t know. And the pillows are supposed to be pointed a certain way. The open side of the pillowcase is supposed to be pointed in toward the other side of the bed. I don’t know why.”

~Stephen King (taken from Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King, by Lisa Rogak

Surprisingly, Mr King's routine is organized, ritualized, and structured - and not crazy. All are criteria that I am striving for in my own daily routine.

Now how to accomplish that...

I found a nice blog post with tips on establishing a routine. Here are the tips:

The key steps to establishing routines are to:

1. Focus on them. Keep your routine as your foremost goal for one month, focusing on nothing else. Having too many habits at once spreads your focus too thin, and makes success less likely.
2. Make them rewarding. I’ve written about establishing a calming routine, and that’s what I’m doing with these two routines. In the morning, I have running, coffee, reading, writing, and showering as part of my calming routine. In the evening, I quietly prepare for the next day, review my day, shower and read. They’re both very satisfying routines.
3. Log your progress. Reporting your progress every day on the Zen Habits forum is a great way to log progress, but you could also do it in a journal or some other type of log, or put up stars on a calendar. The key is to keep track of it and see how well you’ve done over the course of a month.

So here are my daily goals:

To work by 8 a.m.

Out of work by 4 p.m.

1-2 hours of homework

45 minutes - 1 hour of exercise

45 minutes - 1 hour walking Humphrey (can split between multiple times - the bulk being an afternoon walk)

Cook dinner

Update social media (blog, Twitter, Facebook, etc)

Catch up on current events

Time to read, watch TV, stare at a wall, etc - dedicated Holly zone-out time

Two days a week I have classes - so nights are dedicated to them.

So, with all of my ideas on how I would spend my day, and my ability to multitask like a maniac, I still can't figure out how to get everything accomplished and not lose out on a solid night's sleep.

My progress towards establishing a routine will become part of these posts. Hopefully, things will go well.

Thanks for reading. Any tips or ideas you might have, would be greatly appreciated! Have an amazing weekend!