rituals

Work Desk Must haves

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Yesterday I shared about my whiteboard, a key element in my office that inspires me.

Today, I will share what I also keep at my desk in front of me at all times:

On cardboard paper:

  • My Work Goals for the quarter (it’s very important to keep your goals visible)
  • My work affirmations (added just recently).
    • I am committed to being a leader, an initiator, an over-communicator and fast deliverer at my job.
    • I am committed to getting better and better at my job.
    • I am committed to communicating clearly and effectively.
    • I am committed to giving generously to others, the more I give, the more I receive and the happier I feel.
    • I am committed to expanding in abundance, success and love and inspiring others to do the same

On post-it notes:

  • My mantra of the Year: Practice Focused Attention. Maybe I need to rephrase into a question: Are you practicing focused attention? Much more powerful, no?
  • My workday startup ritual steps, including the check-in questions.
  • My workday shutdown ritual steps, including the check-out questions.

Since writing my ritual steps on post-its last month I’ve been committing to them more. In addition, I set an alarm 30 minutes before workday end to remind me to start my shutdown ritual and leave on time.

I hope you find this helpful to you.

Snapshot from my work desk showing some of the above

Work Desk Must haves

Evening Ritual Revisited

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While I set a superb evening ritual earlier this year, the changes in the local lockdown hours, and consequently working hours, had me mess it up and it is an area I want to improve in quarter 2 of the year. For example, I used to have lunch at work, now with lunch break cancellation at work to leave earlier, I started having lunch in the evenings so I come home feeling too hungry to take a walk.

Moreover, I have written the ritual steps here in my blog and in my planner, but they were nowhere to be seen at the house. I did not make the steps visible enough, I did not repeat them enough, so I simply forgot them.

Starting this month:

  • I will write the evening ritual steps on several post-it notes and place them in different rooms around the house like the kitchen, bedroom and learning room (laundry room/home office/study room). This will help me know what I need to do next.
  • I will also fine tune my habits according to the updated, albeit temporary, working hours. For instance I started taking oatmeal with me again to work to avoid the evening hunger that tempts me to skip walking.
  • I already track some habits of my evening routine daily, like story time with kids, but maybe I need to dedicate one sheet of my habit tracker to the evening routine steps in order to make crossing off each item rewarding. I will try it and report back.

Evening Ritual Revisited

My Evening Ritual is how I prepare for easy mornings

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Commitment to my evening routine is still a bit new for me as I have always overestimated my energy level and planned stuff to be done in evenings but didn’t do. Good evening routines are the secret to easy mornings and I always encourage my podcast listeners and the early risers groups I lead to fix their bedtime and evening routine first before they commit to earlier morning wakeup time.

With my digital declutter month I managed to commit to my evening routine more and discovered how much my phone was getting in the way of enjoying it. My habit of blocking Whatsapp between 6pm and 9pm worked like magic in January and I plan to keep doing it daily as long as I don’t have outings with friends.

I will post here my ideal evening routine:

  1. Be home at 5:30pm.
  2. If I did not walk in the morning: walk outside with the kids or with an audiobook (for a minimum of 15 minutes).
  3. Have my early dinner/snack with my favorite comedy show (10 minutes).
  4. Play with kids or do homework or give the kids baths (60-90 minutes)
  5. Prepare fruits and vegetables lunchboxes for all the family for next day with an audiobook while kids have their dinner (15 minutes)
  6. Prepare my coffee machine for next day (5 minutes)
  7. Kids in PJs, story time and bedtime (30 minutes)
  8. Pick my outfit for next workday (10 minutes)
  9. End the day with removing my makeup and a good shower (10 minutes).
  10. Open and post on my social media which is going to be my new social media rule based on the insights I have had in my digital declutter month (30-60 minutes)
  11. Spend time with hubby.
  12. Write in my gratitude and daily stoic journals. (5 minutes)
  13. Read until I sleep by 11pm max.

My mornings are superb when I only need to press the ON button of my coffee machine, take my lunchbox from the fridge and put-on my laid-out outfit for the day. I encourage you to prepare for your mornings like this. How we start and end our days matter so much. Take care of the ordinary parts of your day to make room for the extraordinary to happen.

My Evening Ritual is how I prepare for easy mornings

My Workday Shutdown Ritual is how I set boundaries between work life and family life

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For my workday shutdown routine I follow the 15-minute checkout steps as exactly mentioned in the book Start Finishing:

“The checkout is critical because we usually have a better perspective at the end of the day than at the beginning of the day. We know what we did and didn’t do, and we have a good idea of the next steps we need to take to keep the ball rolling. So while our level of overwhelm might be higher, we don’t suffer the mental cobwebs that cloud the beginning of the day.”

Charlie Gilkey-Start Finishing

 The 15-minute checkout has three questions:    

  1. What did you accomplish? (Celebrate!) Acknowledge what you did rather than just focusing on what you didn’t do. Always, always, always celebrate what you accomplished. Life is but a series of small steps, and if you don’t celebrate the small wins, it’s harder to build up the momentum for the bigger ones.
  2. Is there anything that you need to do right now to be able to disengage? This question answers that nagging feeling that you’ve forgotten to do something. Check your inbox and your to-do list for those things that have to happen today. Ask yourself what would really happen if you didn’t do whatever you’re considering — you would be surprised how many things can wait until the next day.    
  3. When do you need to do the things that you didn’t get done today? There might be a lot of things that came up during the day that need to get done sometime soon, but they don’t have to happen today. If something needs to happen tomorrow or some specific day in the future, put it in whatever app, tool, planner, or calendar you use so that you’ll see it tomorrow. That way your mind can let it go and you can get some peace.

I added a 4th question inspired by my Full Focus Planner:

  • Write your daily big 3 tasks for tomorrow.  These are the tasks that will move my key projects and goals forward. Writing them will help me start next day with clarity.

I also love what Cal Newport says when he is done with workday shutdown ritual:

Finally — and I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit this — I close down my computer and say the magic phrase: “schedule shutdown, complete.”

Cal Newport

What about you, did any of these steps appeal to you? I highly recommend you consider some ritual to announce you’re done with work and not take its worries with you back home.

Listen to the podcast episode about this in Arabic:

My Workday Shutdown Ritual is how I set boundaries between work life and family life

My Workday Startup Ritual is how I stay laser focused

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My ideal workday startup ritual consists of the following steps:

  1. Arrive to office.
  2. Fill up my water bottle.
  3. Light up my office candle (stays on for an hour).
  4. Read for 5 minutes from a work related book (finished reading “To sell is human” like this, currently reading “The motivation manifesto”).
  5. Scan my annual and quarterly work goals and weekly tasks sheet.
  6. Do the 10-minute check-in as mentioned in the amazing book Start Finishing by answering:
    1. Has anything significant changed between now and the last checkout? The key word here is significant. Some events do change the course of your day. For instance, your kids might get sick and you’ll need to change your plans to be able to take care of them.    
    1. What did you plan for today? This is where you review the plan you made for yourself the day before.
    1. What’s one thing you’re going to start on right now? This step is all about setting the intention to focus on this one thing for your next time block.
  7. Time block my day using my passion planner. I learned this productivity method from Deep Work book, and I believe this is a very important step to keep me focused during the day and mindful of shifts in my schedule and outside interruptions and self-initiated distractions.
  8. Start working on my most important task.
My Workday Startup Ritual is how I stay laser focused

My Morning ritual is how I center myself daily

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When I wake up I have a morning ritual that helps me receive the day with a clear mind and leave the house ready for the day. When I arrive at my office I have a ritual which helps me start my work day fresh and focused. At the end of the workday I have a ritual which helps me leave work knowing I got my most important tasks done and ready for next workday and in the evening I have a ritual which makes sure I end the day ready for tomorrow.

Michael Hyatt helped me understand that rituals are a stack of steps you do in the same sequence every time to signal the start and end of events. Rituals set up the stage and reduce the time and energy spent figuring out next steps and also save our mental energy for more important decisions throughout the day.

He recommends having 4 rituals:

Today I will share with you my ideal morning ritual currently. Note that I said “currently” because I try to revisit and update my rituals every quarter as they normally change with different seasons, like school starting and finishing and so on.

  1. Wake up at 5am, wash up and apply face moisturizer to get ready for makeup later (10 minutes).
  2. Go to kitchen, turn on coffee machine and do pushups for 2 minutes while waiting for water to warm up enough. (5 minutes)
  3. Have warm water with half a spoon of honey plus my turmeric and black pepper pill. (5 minutes).
  4. Go to my home office and meditate (10 minutes).
  5. Get my coffee and read A Course In Miracles textbook (10 minutes).
  6. Write in my journal (15 minutes).
  7. Write in my kids’ one-line journals (5 minutes).
  8. Write in my five minute gratitude journal (5 minutes).
  9. Read The Daily Stoic book and answer the prompt (5 minutes).
  10. Text my early risers groups and send them inspiring words for the day, sometimes done at the beginning of the ritual. (5 minutes)
  11. Walk outside with an audiobook/podcast (20 minutes)
  12. Make Sandwiches and place pre-prepared lunchboxes in bags (5-10 minutes)
  13. Apply makeup (15 minutes)
  14. Get dressed (10 minutes)
  15. Lock doors to leave the house (5 minutes)

This ideal scenario ritual takes 135 minutes which is logical in non-school days. However, if I still wake up at 5am in school days I will be leaving the house too late for school. So in school days I either need to wake up at 4:30am or I need to do the non-negotiable crash version of my ritual which downsizes key steps to 5 minutes which are meditation and reading ACIM. I never tried walking in the morning with schools open so I need to test this step or get walking habit back to evening ritual like before as the days are getting longer now in quarter 1 of the year.

Next post I will share with you my workday sartup ritual. Keep reading.

My Morning ritual is how I center myself daily