The Power of Routine: My Daily Habits for Health, Knowledge, and Growth

Continuing from my last post about prioritizing self-care, here is my daily routine as it pertains to the 3 areas of self-care: Exercise and meditation, reading, and skill acquisition.

Before I get into it, let me clarify that I’m not suggesting that you follow my routine. Everyone is different and should create something that works for their specific situation.

Additionally, I change my routine every now and again depending on what I’m doing in life.

So treat this as an example.

This is the first thing I do when I wake up. It consists of a 5-ish minute warm up, 20-ish minutes of either strength training or cardio, 10-ish minutes of yoga stretching, and finally, 10-ish minutes of meditation or breathwork.

The whole process is about 45 minutes to an hour.

I do this throughout the day, mainly after lunch and before bed. I think on average I probably read about 20 to 30 minutes a day.

In recent years I’ve been enjoying learning Spanish. I like to do this after my exercise and meditation, though I only spend about 10 minutes a day on it.

10 minutes a day might not seem like much, but over 2 years, and with living in Colombia for several months at a time, I have gotten pretty good. Not fluent, but conversational.

The next thing I want to learn is Mandarin. After that I’d like to learn an instrument and then how to draw.

You’ll notice there are no times. I do my best to engineer my life so I don’t have to be anywhere in the mornings, which means I can wake up naturally.

In general, I wake up with the sun and go to sleep before midnight.

Also, I am not at the three-hour mark yet. Perhaps 90 minutes with a definite lean towards exercise.

I’m happy with my time spent on exercise and meditation. I plan to learn transcendental meditation at the end of the year and then devote some more time towards that each day.

I would also like to dedicate more time to reading, but not in any official way. Perhaps just start reading earlier before I sleep instead of watching Netflix. I go through stages of reading heavily and then watching a series.

Time devoted to skill acquisition is definitely something I would like to increase, and I think I’ll start it at the beginning of next month. I’m not a huge fan of specific timings so I’ll set the routine of doing two Michel Thomas lessons a day and use Anki to learn 5 new words a day.