Daily Rituals: How I Work

Recently I read the book ‘Daily Rituals: How Artists Work’. It describes the habits, schedules, and daily practices some famous artists use to get their work done. Although I definitely don’t consider myself an artist, it did offer me some inspiration for my own daily and weekly rituals. Finding the ideal balance between working effectively (doing the right stuff) and efficiently (doing stuff right) to become the most productive is a continuous quest. With this blog post, I will share the habits, schedules, and practices that, at this moment, suit me best. I will also add the tooling I use because it’s inextricably linked to the used practices.

My mentionable rituals:

• I try to get up as early as possible. Often that’s somewhere between 4:30 AM and 6:00 AM, this includes the weekend. My primary goal is to write for 2 hours straight using Coffitivity to provide focus. I’ve experienced that in the early morning my mind is clear of any other thoughts and boosts with creativity and energy.
• A power nap of 15 minutes is a daily ritual I never skip. On the weekends it’s often around lunchtime. During the week it’s mostly straight after coming home from work. The power nap gives me more than enough energy to overcome the early shift.
• I try to schedule the most important tasks and meetings in the morning. That’s when I’m really at my best. In an ideal situation, I would use the afternoon to read and work out in the gym and start working again in the evening. But considering my job and social life that’s not possible right now.
• Between 6:00 PM and 9:00 PM, it’s family time. After that, I’ll spend one hour preparing for the next day: getting my inbox to zero, creating a task list in Todoist, checking my schedule, preparing for meetings; everything to give me a kick start the next day.
• Roughly between 10:00 PM and 11:00 PM it’s quality time with my girlfriend, reading some articles from my Pocket list, or reading a book.
• On Sunday evening I always do a weekly review. Usually, I take 1,5 hours to reflect on the previous week and get organized for the week ahead, it’s pretty much compared to doing some backlog refinement and ordering my personal backlog.
• For managing my e-mail I use some of the Getting Things Done principles. At the end of the day, my inbox is always brought down to zero. I consider emails as tasks and therefore I add and schedule them into Todoist.

The most important tools I use to support my daily practices:

• Evernote + web clipper: my personal library that gets enriched daily. For every relevant subject, I’ve created a separate notebook. Via the many Evernote extensions, it’s very easy to import interesting articles and videos into the relevant notebook.
• Todoist: my current task management system. Because of the option to stack multiple projects, it distinguishes itself from other GTD tools.
• Pocket: all the interesting articles and videos I see are first uploaded into my Pocket list. I try to spend 30 minutes every day reading some of them. I remove items that are on the list for more than a few months. This is to prevent the list to become endless.
• Twitter: my primary source of knowledge and inspiration. Every day I get to know new interesting articles, books, ideas, quotes, etc.
• iPad Mini & Kindle reader app: although I’ve always been a big fan of the classic hardcopy book, I nowadays read most of my books using the iPad Mini and the Kindle app reader. Getting a summary of all the highlighted text and exporting this to Evernote works like a charm!
• Coffitivity: streams all the sounds of a coffee shop. Provides me with ultimate focus, love it!
• Moleskine diary: For a couple of weeks I’m using a Moleskine diary to keep a daily logbook. During the day I add activities, thoughts, sketches, and whatever comes to mind and is relevant to log. This blog inspired me; maybe it will do the same for you.

Reading the daily rituals of other people offered me some new insights, ideas, and inspiration. Maybe sharing my own rituals can do the same for you, and if you want more examples you can of course always buy the book! What are your work-related daily rituals?

Originally published at www.barryovereem.com on November 23, 2014.