What Habits Are In Your Default Day?

Is it time to create your default day? Look, I realize you can't control every day and every minute of your day, but let's face it, once you weed out big vacations, horrible days where someone dies or you're in a car crash, once you weed out weekends and special time off sick days, there's an awful lot of days in anybody's life that are like any other day. Do you really want it to just happen randomly? Do you really want to go through your day using habits that occur just because a cube has randomly popped up? Oh, you drive by Starbucks, you see the image of the Starbucks lady, so you go in and buy a Starbucks. I've done that before. But is that how you want your day to go? Do you want to give all your power to others? I believe it's high time that you craft your own default day. Doesn't mean you get to follow it 100% every single day, but to have some plan for what the ideal average day. I don't mean ideal day in the sense, oh, I'm in Tahiti, I'm in this beautiful resort, I'm with this beautiful other person. I don't mean that kind of fantasy. I mean your default average day. What is it like? Because there's so many habits you're going to go through in a typical day, whether you realize it or not. There's some experts that say Duke University came out with a study in about 2006 saying 43% of everything you do in a day is a habit. Seen other estimates as high as 80%. Depending on how you define habit, you could go as far as to say 99% of what most people do in a typical day is just going through the motions of a habit. When I say habit, I mean typically things you can do without having to give any conscious thought to it or at least very little thought. So I recommend you come up with a default day for yourself. First thing I do, and this sounds cheesy, it sounds silly, I laughed the first time I saw somebody recommend this, but I now do it. It's a nice way to start a day. When I get up out of bed, I put my feet on the ground and I say, it's going to be a great day. I put a smile on my face, I give myself a fist bump. It takes one second, but it just starts this mental imprint. Looking in the right way, getting up on the so called right side of the bed. It's a tiny little thing, but it is a start. So that's default for me. Now it's one of my habits. It's in my selfie speak program. It's in my checklist, on my phone in a text format. That's how I start my day. And then I try to design my day of what I'm going to do from there. Typically, I am going to write 500 to 1000 words for content for my show, for my online courses, for books all about habits. I do meditation for 10, just 10 minutes a day, nothing excessive. It's not two hours in the morning and two hours at night. It's a 10 minute short meditation session that I do listening to my own voice, guiding me through a meditation process of just simple mindfulness, thinking about, breathing in, breathing out. I then listen to my selfie speak program. I give myself very specific limits of I'm only going to read news for 30 minutes a day. I then go right into at least 15 minutes of reading information about habits. I then go through my checklist. I then have a healthy breakfast. It's either going to be a vegetable omelet or it's going to be granola with a lot of fresh fruit on top. I'm going to have one cup of coffee, not 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 cups like I used to, but one cup. So that takes me up through about 9am So I get up at 6 o'. Clock, that takes me to about 9. Now that also includes spending some time with my daughter, sometimes having breakfast with her, putting her on the bus, spending a little time with my family. And so there's a lot that goes on in those first three hours. But that's my default day. Your default may look completely different, I realize you may have to get up at 5am, be catching a bus at 5:20 to go work in another city because that is the only economic opportunity for you. But you still have the opportunity to define the default things you do on a regular basis. So for example, when you get on that bus for your two hour commute, are you just going to listen to top 40 pop culture music? I like music, I listen to music. But if that's what you do for two hours a day, is that really the best way to design your day? You could spend half of that time listening to an audiobook, which is one of the things I like to do, list every single day. You could spend some of that time reading a book off of Kindle or Amazon or Google Books for free. You could spend part of that commute time every single day reading a book. You have even less time than that. You could spend just 30 seconds, reading a quote, a thought provoking little bit of philosophy once a day. There's a lot of apps for that. I put them out on my own social media. You could spend 10 seconds a day reading a joke. Something I do Typically before 9am Every day is I read one joke, just a little chuckle. Do I learn a tremendous number of ideas? No. But it just puts me in a good frame of mind, a good mood. Ronald Reagan, a former United States president and believe me, I'm not endorsing his policies, we're not talking politics here. He was well known for starting meetings with a joke and asking his chief of staff to help him. A joke first thing in the morning. He liked to be upbeat, he liked to be positive and he liked that positive warm nature to come through with everything he did. There's no denying this was a huge asset in his political career. It was a huge asset in his ability to sell his ideas because he just looked happy and pleasant and upbeat at all times. I feel like I'm more productive when I'm happy. All the research shows that human beings get more done, they get more work done when they're happy. If we're sad, depressed, bummed out, feeling bleh, it's a lot easier to fool ourselves and say let me just check email, next thing you know, okay, you did answer your email box, but you spent the two most productive hours of your whole day, maybe from 9 to 11 just answering email. That's stuff you could have done at 3:30 when you've already accomplished the major significant thought work of the day. And maybe your brain isn't crazy quite sharp, but it's sharp enough to just answer. So I'm asking you, what is your default day? Like most people, unfortunately you may think never really thought of it that way. I like to exercise in the morning or most important work I got to do there. But just one little piece I want you to think about how you lay out your everyday. This is something I've given a lot of thought of thought to ever since really deciding to focus on habits about a year ago as my subspecialty within the personal development space. So I can tell you I do not have every minute of the day walked out. There are some people who swear by not every minute, every five minute interval in their day. To me that would make me feel like a prisoner. But I do like blocking out by the hour. You ask me what I do any hour of the day and I can tell you what I have planned. Does it occasionally verge into something? Sure, But I can just tell you what I have planned from time I get up till about 9, that is time to do some exercise, eat healthy, stretching, meditation, listening to my selfie speak program, a lot of other things, even writing a poem. Some of you know. 9 to noon I spend in deep work creating online courses for you, doing research. Noon to one is the final hour of preparation for this show. From one to three I'm doing a live show with you. From three to four I'm doing things like having a post mortem on the show with Marceau. And we ask ourselves what do we like, what do we not like? What can improve? That's also when I try to do email, go through my database and return phone calls from people looking to hire me for personal development workshop or looking for a new habits based online course. So I'm doing my correspondence there. And then what I try to do in my Perfect Default Day 3:59 Turn off my computer. That signaling to my brain and everything else. It's time to end the regular work day. At four o' clock I go for a long walk. Typically hour, hour and 15 minutes. This is probably the most productive time of my day because that's when I have ideas. That's when I figure out what kind of topics might I want to do in the show tomorrow. Where is my next course going to come from? And it's my time for digital detox. No cell phones allowed, no tablets allowed on my walk. It's a way to get away from media and content and the Internet completely. For an hour, hour and 15 minutes every day. After that I come home. It is some time to spend daughter, family and light reading time. 6 o' clock is typically the dinner hour. 7 to 8 family time, also some reading time. 8 to 9 I try to have watch some sort of short comedy, stand up comedy, something fun, entertainment related. And then 9 to 10 I'm reading a book typically about habits or personal development. Lights out. That's my default day. That may sound like the worst possible day ever in your life. That's okay, just leading my own life. But what is your default day? If you don't have one, you're giving that power to somebody else.