I can’t follow my daily schedule: how to be consistent in daily routine?

Maybe you’ve decided to better yourself and wrote out a daily routine, but can’t seem to get around following it consistently, if at all. You’ve been excited when you started, but now feel like following your daily schedule is a burden. That’s not too uncommon, and with the knowledge, I’m going to share with you below, you can get back on track to having more order and discipline in your life.

Developing a good daily routine and following it is a habit, and just like any other habit it will take time to grow and will require effort on your part to become an automatic behavior so that you don’t have to expend your willpower to make yourself keep up with a routine. Until you’ve developed a habit of following a healthy and productive daily schedule, there will be resistance, and the severity/longevity of it will vary from person to person, you may even experience spikes of internal rebellions, making you feel contempt for the routine you’re trying to follow.

Common errors, which result in the inability to follow a routine include:

• trying too much at once,
• starting with a too-complex routine,
• not factoring in breaks,
• not rewarding yourself

Solving those errors, as well as making the habit easy, accessible, and satisfying for yourself will make following your daily schedule an effortless process.

I. Why can’t I stick to a routine?

Among the main reasons you fail to follow a well-structured daily schedule are:

1. choosing immediate gratification over long-term improvement
2. being stuck in a “default mode” – not having confidence for action, and choosing to keep a passive status quo
3. trying too much at once – being overwhelmed with a sudden increase in structure and discipline, you demand of yourself

1. Immediate gratification and a confused pleasure system

When you try following a routine, but instead feel like you’re stuck in a monotonous activity, and ultimately get bored with it to the point of discontinuing your elaborately put-together schedule, one nefarious thing might be in play.

First of all, you’ve chosen immediate gratification instead of the long-term benefits of a structured, planned-ahead lifestyle (more on those later in the article). You already know what’s better for yourself, because you’ve decided to follow a good routine. Maybe you wanted to boost your productivity, by following the schedules of famous successful entrepreneurs. Or you could have wanted to improve your health and shape by introducing daily doses of exercise and removing regular tasty sugary snacks from your diet.

You have your reasons for introducing a good routine into your life because you are at least intuitively aware of its benefits. But you’ve decided to follow the old well-established path of dopamine breadcrumbs, which your brain was trained over the years to follow. You’ve put off working on an interesting project, which would have led to at least some degree of self-actualization and would have improved your professional skills. Hours, allocated to it, were spent on social media. The scheduled exercises weren’t whole-heartedly followed, and the snacks, which were meant to be removed, stayed.

Those are the signs, that you’ve become enslaved by a misguided and confused pleasure (dopamine) system of your brain. Its primary role is to give us motivation (by way of pleasure) to perform important actions (which become associated with this pleasure). But when certain stimulants become abused or overused, your dopamine system gives you pleasant feedback for actions, which will never lead to any real-world success.

For example, intimate contact with the opposite sex is pleasant and is meant to motivate you to compete for the best and most attractive partners, because that leads to reproduction. But when highly vivid and stimulating pornographic content is consumed, especially regularly, pleasure can be had, but porn users experience at least some degree of decrease in the quality of their relationships. And of course, nobody has yet created a big happy family out of habitually masturbating to Internet porn.

This, of course, is a definite sign you need to tackle your wild monkey brain, by adding some structure and discipline into most (or all) of the days of your life.

2. Default mode and the role of confidence

If you’ve been thinking and reading about the benefits of daily routines, but still haven’t gotten around to following one, or even planning it out, another foe might be pulling you back.

Research has been done into status quo bias in the human brain. In it, researchers told the participants to be the referees of sports games, they were watching on the screen. Each participant was supposed to tell whether the ball bounced in or out of bounds in the game of tennis. Participants were holding down a button while watching a game of tennis, and if they kept holding the button, the default decision was made(“in” or “out” for different sets of experiments was used to factor out a possible bias for an actual decision type). If instead, the “referee” chose to lift a finger, the other, non-default judgment was made.

And as the paper shows, the majority of decisions made were default ones, even as the judgment error rate was increasing.

What it shows, is that going against a default mode is a challenge, which requires extra motivation and courage. Participants got paralyzed while trying to make a decision and chose inaction, even though it was repeatedly leading to erroneous calls. And they did it because they didn’t have confidence in their decisions.

Maybe it’s your default mode, that is getting activated when you are trying to change for the best. So, recognize, why and with what purpose are you trying to build a habit of following a daily schedule, and figure out ways to make it accessible and rewarding every day for yourself (more on this in the section below) to help you follow through with it consistently.

3. Overwhelmed and unsatisfied

You could have also fallen into the pitfall of trying to force too much on yourself, maybe you’ve never been used to structure, and now are trying to follow a completely busy and highly disciplined schedule of a famous CEO, and your schedule involves accomplishing too much in every single day.

Maybe, for exaggerated example, you’re trying to get your exercises, article writing, skill learning, and prototyping the next project you’d like to become a successful startup into each day for the next month, when before, all you’ve managed to do on many days of your life, was to wake up and play a videogame while crunching some Doritos.

You don’t want to start being a tyrant to yourself now, all of a sudden if you’ve allowed a relaxed and pleasant life all this time before. Take small steps and make small incremental steady improvements to your routine.

To make the routines stick, to make them into a habit, not only accessibility of actions you want to perform daily is important (i.e. a packed exercise bag next to your door), but also a reward for them. Give yourself half an hour of usual entertainment: games, social media, watching videos on YouTube. Just make sure that this short satisfaction isn’t transforming into several hours of procrastination.

II. Benefits of following daily routines

A routine is a set of good habits we develop as a daily practice. It is best followed in a well-defined schedule (examples in the next section), which allows a certain degree of flexibility, while being explicit enough, so that you know, which things you should focus on right now (because you’ve scheduled them sometime in the past, and made a decision to follow through to get the best results out of your efforts). Flexibility is there to be able to adapt for more important things when they come up if they come up, but should not be abused.

The concept of good habits means that we’re not talking about a routine of smoking a cigarette every 30 minutes each day from the time you wake up to the time you go to sleep. Smoking damages your body, and being a destructive habit would certainly not fall into the category of “good”. Some of the good habits are meant to improve your health, mentally and physically. Others will shape your identity, making you more capable of achieving your desires, as instead of wishing for them, you’ll get the focus and discipline necessary to decide and pursue your dreams and goals.

Therefore, I’ll put the benefits of following a daily schedule into two main categories:

1. psychological benefits (internal) – improving your cognitive functions, increasing energy levels, and improving emotional stability.
2. life performance benefits (external) – moving you higher on a scale of success in whatever social hierarchy you desire to take part in – from job productivity to athletic performance.

While improvements in your psyche will definitely increase your real-life performance, the distinction here is to better illustrate, how a daily routine can positively influence you on different levels.

1. Psychological (internal) benefits

In the previous section, the problem with the inability to defer gratification was mentioned among the prime reasons for the inability to follow a routine. Paradoxically, a well-defined routine is a perfect tool to bring more structure and discipline into your life, and make you more resistant to impulses of immediate satisfaction at the expense of long-term benefit.

This is partly because a lack of routine is an ideal condition for habitual procrastination. It opens gaps in your time, for which you might be tempted to give yourself a break and enjoy some fun distraction. And then you start habitually taking breaks, because the more of those gaps you have, the more you fall for the tempting expedient entertainment – the more you will reinforce the identity of a procrastinator in yourself.

When your daily actions are defined and scheduled, you aren’t confronting the unknown all the time anymore, and as a result anxiety levels decrease – you don’t need the fight or flight instincts ramped up when your environment is more or less familiar and predictable.

Routine is there to help make your subconscious mind feel safe and steady, through repeated well-defined actions and expected outcomes. Therefore even the small increments to your daily structure will be beneficial. More reasons for steady steps in implementing your routine and not having an overly complex overwhelming schedule tyrannize you to the point of abandonment of all the attempts, which were so promising when you decided to start.

Studies have been done into the beneficial effects of routines on sleep. With improved sleep, you are much less likely to fall victim to low moods, depression, anxiety, and will go about your daily business with far more energy.

Organizing yourself into a routine gives you more focus on what to pursue (because you explicitly define it) and the ability to resist counterproductive thoughts and desires, as you’ll understand what benefits you are meant to reap in the end, in other words, what to expect.

2. Life performance (external) benefits

There is a difference between wishing for success and deciding to become successful.

A wishful person might have a desire to improve their position in life but doesn’t act to move toward their goal. They typically will keep to their old habits, which are very likely counterproductive, despite realizing it.

Someone, who has decided to become successful has adjusted his habits and daily choices accordingly, likely sacrificing many hours of expedient entertainment for the same amount of focused work.

Success is a long-term manifestation of the deliberate pursuit of it.

Habitual honing of your skills, learning them, studying trends and demands in society, or even simply paying attention to the needs and problems of people in your community, is bound to yield a way to earn a good living. And the one, which you may enjoy, and which can bring wealth beyond your needs.

Habitual empathy for people and genuine attempts to collaborate and achieve together with others, while ostracizing those, who bring you down, is bound to yield healthy and pleasant relationships.

All of those things come from repeated regular dedicated work and are a result of a lifestyle. And a lifestyle is a set of your daily habits and actions.

What you want to do therefore is to become the kind of a person, with whom such success is associated, for whom such success-bringing habits are a lifestyle. For example:

• NOT to read a book, BUT become a READER.
• NOT to get an A in math, BUT become AN EXCELLENT STUDENT.
• NOT to run 10 miles, BUT become A RUNNER.

On the flip side, consider, for example, someone having a full set of bad habits, and the result they are getting in life out of it:

• Bad financial habits – never having enough money.
• No healthy food and exercise habits, while smoking on top of that – constantly lethargic, low on energy, getting sick more often.
• No work/study discipline – constantly getting distracted and wasting many hours of the limited time they have on forgettable entertainment.

They might be telling themselves – “Money never stays with me”, “I’m not an athletic guy”, or “I’m not a productive person”. On top of having poor life outcomes, they lock themselves into that losing lifestyle.

Just as a set of good habits (a good routine) can bring out a winner in you, a set of bad habits can turn you into a loser. And when it’s habitual – it’s automatic and hard to change.

We’ll explore the most effective ways to change your habits and bring a good routine into your life in the last section of this article.

Additionally, the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment shows, how children, who were unable to defer the gratification, choosing one small but immediate reward, over two small rewards if they waited for some time, had worse life outcomes and success, than the ones, who controlled their impulses better, choosing the long-term benefit.

III. Examples of good daily routines

There are several important principles, guiding how you should schedule your daily routine.

• Personalize your schedule. If you are better at doing creative/analytical work at night, schedule all of the repetitive chores in the morning, and early afternoon, and put off the important tasks to later hours of the day. If exercises work better during the middle of the day – extend your lunch break to put in the workout and finish your work in later hours of the day.
• Keep the schedule in one spot. Don’t be forced to search through several sources for what you’ve planned to do today – keep things simple and accessible for yourself.
• Be realistic with your schedule. Don’t overload yourself – demand only what you can do, while having enough challenge in your daily tasks for growth.
• Allocate breaks in your day. Be sure to reward yourself every now and then for following the routine, and have some time for relaxing.

For some ideas for activities to include in your routine, to better personalize your schedule, consider those main areas of your life:

• Relevant to you: things and chores you need to do to keep your life in order and be your healthiest: making your bed, brushing teeth, exercising, cleaning your room, reading, learning.
• Relevant to your relationships: things you might do to others, which would help you to connect personally.
• Relevant to your professional life: improving your professional expertise, learning a new field, related to the ones, in which you are involved, implementing things, which would increase your productivity, and reducing interferences, which force create redundant unnecessary work.

Think of your daily routine as consisting of blocks: morning, midday, evening, and night.

• midday will be mostly dedicated to your professional work, or study
• mornings and evenings are the best timeslots to put routines, which either kick-start your day in the most focused and energetic manner or allow you to analyze and reflect upon the results of this day and plan for things to do on the next day (especially in the “professional” time slot)
• night time is best spent on getting good sleep, and resting to face the next day in your best shape.

• Some ideas for habits to start with:

1. In the morning:
   1. Drink a full glass of water.
   2. Make your bed.
   3. Have some light stretches and warm-up, up to 10 minutes.
   4. Wash up, brush your teeth, take a shower.
   5. Day-dream about what’s coming and what you plan to work on today
2. In the evening:
   1. Leave your work behind, don’t bring your office home with you.
   2. Review your day.
   3. Write a short study/work plan for tomorrow with no more than 2 mission-critical tasks, which you should accomplish tomorrow.
   4. Have a pleasant conversation with your family.
   5. Meditate.
   6. Brush your teeth and go to bed.
3. On a daily basis, situationally:
   • Wash your bowl when you’re after eating.
   • Say thank you more often.
   • Eat more fruits and vegetables.
   • Write one sentence/paragraph/page (however much you can handle without forcing yourself) a day into your journal.
   • Read 500+ words of non-fiction.
   • 40+ minutes of physical exercises, taking whatever timeslot you feel the best to perform physically, and sticking to it.

For example, here’s Benjamin Franklin’s daily routine:

1. 5 a.m. – 7 a.m.:
   • Rise, wash, and address Powerful Goodness
   • Contrive the day’s business and take the resolution of the day
   • Prosecute the present study
   • Breakfast
2. 8 a.m. – 11 a.m.: Work
3. 12 a.m. – 1 p.m.:
   • Read and overlook my accounts
   • Dine
4. 2 p.m. – 5 p.m.: Work
5. 6 p.m. – 9 p.m.:
   • Put things in their places
   • Supper
   • Music, or diversion, or conversation
   • Examination of the day
6. 10 p.m. – 4 a.m.: Sleep

IV. Making routines “stick”: developing habits

To make following a routine easy, you need to turn it into a habit – that way it becomes effortless and, for some activities, even automatic. This means you don’t just follow your schedule when you are in a good mood and feel like it. You do that daily, you do that consistently and reinforce the organized, productive and fulfilling behavior as a habit.

A routine is really a tool of building good habits in your life (however, following a good routine can be seen as a habit in and of itself), but initially (or a few days after starting) you might feel a pushback – the desire to stop this endeavor altogether. That is a time period you have to get through until good habits settle in and become part of your identity. Many approaches were developed to make this process the easiest for you and help you to avoid the temptation to return to the chaotic life of immediate gratification without a long-term perspective.

One of the most powerful approaches to building habits is based on the book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear.

The main concept discussed is the habit cycle, which consists of 4 parts:

1. Cue: triggers your brain to initiate the behavior (ex. you reach a difficult problem in your studying)
2. Craving: the motivational force behind every habit (ex. you feel stuck and want to relieve your frustration)
3. Response: actual behavior that is performed (ex. you pull out your phone and check Instagram)
4. Reward: the end goal of every habit (ex. you satisfy your craving and feel relieved)

The four laws of behavioral change, described in the book, are using the habit cycle to build good habits and break bad habits:

1. The 1st law (cue) – good habit: make it obvious; bad habit: make it invisible.
2. The 2nd law (craving) – good habit: make it attractive; bad habit: make it unattractive.
3. The 3rd law (response) – good habit: make it easy; bad habit: make it difficult.
4. The 4th law (reward) – good habit: make it satisfying; bad habit: make it unsatisfying.

The law and it’s principles	Main actions	Details of actions	Examples of actions
1. Make it obvious (Cue) The cues that trigger our habits are often common to the point that they become invisible to our consciousness (eg the phone next to you while you study). Our responses to these cues are so hardwired that we must begin the process of behavior change with awareness.	1.1. Pointing and calling	Identify which habits you want to build, and for what reasons do you want to do it	In the operating room, surgeons do “time-out” prior to an incision, the surgeon leads the health care team in verifying the patient’s medical record, name, date of birth, procedure, what side of the body the procedure is being done and the medications administrated prior to incision.
	1.2. Implementation intention	Formula: I will (behavior) at (time) in (location). Specifically describing the exact action you will take at a specific cue will greatly increase your chances of success	I will (meditate for 5 minutes) at (7 am) in (my living room)
	1.3. Habit coupling/habit pairing	Associating one habit which you consistently perform with a new one that you are trying to build	You stretch every morning without fail, but your meditation isn’t as consistent. By coupling the two, you are much more likely to meditate every single day
	1.4 Habit stacking formula	“After (current habit), I will (new habit)”. The cue should be highly specific and immediately actionable	“When I (serve myself a meal) I will (always put veggies on my plate first)”
2. Make it attractive. (Craving) Dopamine is the neurotransmitter most implicated in pleasure and addiction, it’s not only associated with the experience of pleasure but also released when you anticipate pleasure. This anticipation is what leads us to take action.	2.1. Temptation bundling	The behavior will be attractive if you get to do one of your favorite things at the same time you are doing that behavior. You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Join the culture where Your desired behavior = the normal behavior	You love the TV show “Top Gear and The Grand Tour”, then you tell yourself that you can watch it as long as you want, but you must stretch while doing so
	2.2. Equation for temptation bundling	1. After (current habit), I will (the habit I need) 2. After (the habit I need), I will (the habit I want)	After I (pull out my phone) I will (do ten burpees [need]). After (I do ten burpees), I will (check Instagram [want]).
	2.3 Neuro-hacks	Mindset determines how pleasurable or painful the experience is, not the actual experience itself	1. Swap the word “have” with “get”, instead of saying “I (have) to exercise”, say it “I (get) to exercise” 2. In the case of “public speaking”: Reinterpreting your physiologic response from fear to excitement: “yeah, my heart is racing, but not because I’m scared to speak, but because I’m so excited to speak”
3. Make it easy. (Response). Habits formed based on frequency, not time. It’s not a question of how many weeks for a habit to stick, but rather the frequency and number of repetitions that make the difference. Over time, it will get easier and easier.	3.1. Reduce the friction of good habits and increase the friction of bad habits		Reduce your friction on the exercise by joining a gym that is on the way home from school + pack your gym stuff the night before
	3.2. Don’t try perfecting your habit from the start, just try getting it to stick	Oftentimes, we are overzealous with our new habits and overdo them, burning ourselves out. The key is stay below the point where it feels like work.
4. Make it satisfying. (Reward). What is rewarded is repeated, what is punished is avoided. Unfortunately, we operate in a delayed return environment and many of the habits we wish to ingrain aren’t immediately satisfying. The pay off only in the long-term. Time inconsistency: we, as humans, value the present more than the future. The reward that is certain right now is typically worth more than one that is merely possible in the future, but this bias to instant gratification often leads to problems.	4.1. Add a little bit of immediate pleasure to the habits that pay off in the long run (or immediate pain to bad habits)	Incentives start the habit. Identity sustains the habit. Measure progress and make the progress satisfying through the use of habit trackers Keep your focus on your process, not on your results	Oftentimes, we are overzealous with our new habits and overdo them, burning ourselves out. The key is to stay below the point where it feels like work.

V. Helpful apps for successful scheduling, habit tracking and building healthy routines

In the pursuit of consistency in our daily routines, finding the right tools can make all the difference. One such invaluable resource is the Greatness app. Dubbed as a daily habit tracker, routine planner, and personal life coach, Greatness goes above and beyond in empowering users to not only establish meaningful habits but also to craft routines that resonate with their unique aspirations. This app stands out for its tailored programs, which cover a wide spectrum of domains including physical and mental well-being, nutrition, relationships, and productivity, among others. What sets Greatness apart from generic habit trackers is its unwavering commitment to personalization. Users have the opportunity to curate a custom library of habit programs, educational courses, and CBT-based coaching content, ensuring that their journey towards a more consistent daily schedule is both effective and entirely aligned with their goals and lifestyle. With Greatness, turning aspirations into accomplishments becomes an achievable reality.

Additional tips to help consistently follow a routine and develop good habits:

• Focus on starting. This is part of the habit that matters most in the first month or so.
• Start small, 5-10 minutes is enough, in the beginning, build the habit first, and only then increase your demands as your habit strengthens.
• Chunk it up. Determine the minimum chunk length and perform each activity in chunks. This will help to keep you motivated.
• Reinforce the habits at the pace, which is comfortable for you.
• Record somewhere the actions you want to build the habits of (or the ones you want to get rid of), as they are done by you, and track your progress toward the goal.
• Automate the measurements and tracking of your progress whenever possible. I.e. Use a smart scale that automatically syncs with your phone. Manual tracking should only be done on your most important habits.
• Whenever you skip: remind yourself of a simple rule: never miss twice. It’s never the first mistake that ruins you, it’s the spiral of repeated mistakes that follow. “Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.”
• Watch your thoughts. If you start to avoid the habit or do the habit reluctantly, or want to quit – pay attention to the thoughts, which accompany those feelings. Where are they coming from? How are you rationalizing quitting? Is there negative self-talk?
• Ask a friend for help, tell them to ask you every other night if you’re keeping up with the schedule
• Try the Pomodoro Technique, which is based on a timer to break down work into intervals, traditionally 25 minutes in length, separated by short breaks. See, if a routine like that could suit you.

Armed with all this knowledge all you have to do now is take action. Take action, and deliberately move forward, disregarding momentary expedient impulses. Be brave, but be disciplined.