The trend of developing morning or evening routines and imagining what a “day in the life of X” looks like blocks what's important. Your best days can be no matter how productive if your worst ones destroy your progress.
Instead of improving your good days, you should make sure that you contain the damage of your bad days. If you only deal with routines, you are more vulnerable in the swamp of demotivation. You also need to deal with what you do on your bad days so that you can mitigate the effects.
You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
James Clear
He is right in saying that. We must ensure that we come at least minimally closer to our goals even on bad days. We must not allow such times to destroy our hard-earned progress.
You don't achieve this by working harder and harder, but rather by dealing with your bad days. The following questions can help if you answer them honestly:
- How do you recognize that a day is going badly?
- What do you do on such a day and why?
- How do you manage to break out of this negative pattern?
- How can you make sure that you manage this change more often or faster?
- What would you like to shout to yourself on a bad day?
Once you have thought of answers to these questions, next try to incorporate the possible solutions into your everyday life. For example, if you can concentrate again after a nap, try it out!
Against all odds, there's one big advantage to this approach that working on good days can't offer: No matter what you try, you can't make a bad day worse.