Healthy Habits, part 2: Your Evening Routine
Welcome to this week's blog. This is part two of our little mini-series about healthy habits with a specific focus on how to stay healthy and engaged as a creative during the entire course of the year. Last week, we talked about morning routines and I shared three tips about how to come up with a great morning routine. I also shared my specific routine with you.
As promised, this week's broadcast is about your evening routine. Evening routines aren’t talked about nearly as much as morning routines. I’m not sure why because I find my evening routine absolutely essential as a way to help me maintain balance between my work like and my family life.
In my opinion, an evening routine is just as important as a morning routine because it helps you wrap up your day. I don't know about you, but I’m a creative entrepreneur and I love my business. I also love to work and generally work all day long and have a really hard time stopping.
It's very important to have a system or a routine that helps us wrap up the work day and shift our focus to our family or friends or other “non-work” activities. I discovered how important this was for me personally this year because I found myself working 24-7 and needed a way to gain back some balance in my life. Let’s talk about my tips for developing an evening routing that works for you.
Tip #1: Keep it short
In my opinion, your evening routine should be pretty short. Pick when you want to start the process itself, say at 6pm in the evening. You don’t want the process to take an hour because that means you won’t be “done” until 7pm and that’s late, right? I try to start my evening routing around 5:30pm and it’s only a 30-minute process. That means I’m “done” and can focus on dinner and my family starting around 6pm.
Tip #2: Focus on winding down
As you think about the activities that comprise your evening routine, make sure they are helping you wind down, not get amped up. LOL. For example, don’t try to finish a big project at the end of the day. It will likely take too long and you may not be able to finish it completely so it will hang over you during the evening when you’re trying to stop thinking about work.
Tip #3: Celebrate your wins
Review your to do list and check off the items that you accomplished that day. Who doesn’t love that sense of accomplishment when you check things off your list, right? It’s a great feeling and helps you wind down for the day. We don’t celebrate what we accomplish as often as we criticize ourselves for what we didn’t get done. Let’s stop that habit and celebrate more, not less.
Let me share what my evening routine looks like. Adopt it if you’d like or use it as inspiration for coming up with your own.
My evening routine takes about 30 minutes and involves three activities:
· Check off my accomplishments for the day
· Write down my “big 3” tasks for the following day
· Organize unread emails
I love Michael Hyatt’s full focus planner so the first thing I do in my evening routine is grab my planner. I review what I had set out to accomplish that day and check off the tasks I completed. Michael recommends that you only pick 3 things each day. I dive deeper into this process in my blog called The Daily Execution. Go back and watch that if you missed it.
The second part of my routine is I flip to the next page in my planner and I write down the “big 3” for the next day. If I didn’t complete something on a particular day, I’ll carry it forward to the next. But I’ve found over time that if I’m really intentional about the big 3 that I pick, I can generally get them all done. This gives me a wonderful sense of accomplishment each day. Determining my tasks for the following day also allows me to relax. When I wake up in the morning, I don't have to decide what I'm going to work on. I've already done that work the night before. I find that really helpful.
Finally, the third part of my routine is to go into my email box and just organize it. I mentioned that you don't want to work on anything that’s going to make you anxious or overwhelmed. Staying current with email and responding to you in a timely manner is very important to me. If I haven’t gotten to “email zero” by the end of the day, I move unanswered emails into a “need to reply” folder. That way, I have prioritized the ones I need to respond to the following day.
There you have it. Those are my three, fairly simple, evening routine activities. I hope you find them helpful. Once I’m done, I shift my focus to my family and know that I’ve set myself up for success for the following day.
Do you have an evening routing? Join me LIVE on Wednesday at noon PST on my Facebook Page, Anne LaFollette Art. Come and share yours with me. I’d love to know what works for you.
Watch Anne TV for more details.
Remember,
It’s Never Too Late to Create
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MEET ANNE
Hi…I’m Anne!
My creative inspiration comes from a lifetime of observation. I grew up in Paris on the Place St. Sulpice and walked to school through the Luxembourg gardens. And that was only the beginning… Learn more by watching the video on my About page.
