The more winning days you have, the more successful your life will be. So today you’re going to learn exactly how to design a perfect day.
KEY POINTS
Are You Well Rested? – If you wake up feeling groggy, not well rested it’s very hard to have a great day. You need to ensure you have a good evening routine.
Exercise Control Over Your Day – Ask yourself, ‘What do I want to achieve today? When do I want to do it?’ and make sure it is correctly reflected in your schedule.
Plan Your Day – Visualize how you want the day ahead to go, and how you will behave at your best.
Start Your Day With Exercise – Exercising even for just 10/20 minutes will give you more energy so you can work at a higher rate of output throughout the day.
Practice Meditation – Medication will help you get yourself into a calm state, wiping the slate clean before the day begins.
Split Your Day Up! – Have maker time and manager time. When energy is at its highest, do creative work. And when energy is lower, when you’re interacting with others that’s manager time.
Single Task – Work on one thing at a time before moving onto the next. It’s been shown to reclaim up to two hours of your day that would normally be lost jumping around too many tasks.
TRANSCRIPT
Have you ever been frustrated with how your days go or don’t go? Have you ever wondered how you could string together more winning days? Well, you’re on the right track if you’re thinking this way. Because the more winning days you have, the more successful your life will be. So today you’re going to learn exactly how to design a perfect day.
Hi, my name is Eric Partaker and I’ve been recognized as an award-winning entrepreneur, as well as the CEO of the Year. And I’m also the author of two best-selling books, including The 3 Alarms. Now, let me start out by saying my days used to be so far from perfect. It used to be an embarrassment, frankly. They’d be plagued by reactivity. I’d wake up and the first thing I was doing is checking my email and then there’re notifications for this and that. And then I might be on social media and then suddenly I have a meeting or a phone call and it goes from just one meeting to the next, and then I’m in my inbox some more. And I get to the end of the day and I look back, I’m like, “Gosh, what have I actually done today?” And the reality was that I wasn’t doing all that much. I was just reacting to other people’s schedules and bouncing from one person’s agenda to the next and never actually following my agenda, the things I wanted to do with the day.
But then I started to slowly layer in some of the things I’m going to be teaching you today. And it started to create a perfect day framework for me. So if you have felt that your days have been a struggle and that sometimes you feel like you’re just hanging on to the back of a train and you’re reacting to everything around you rather than doing the things that you like, you’re going to love these simple sets of techniques.
So number one. To design a perfect day, we have to make sure that we are well rested, as simple as that sounds. If you wake up not feeling well rested, not enough sleep, it’s very hard to have a great day. Because you know how it is, you wake up and you’re feeling groggy and it takes 20 minutes just to get out of the bed. And somebody asks how you’re doing, and “I’m fine”. It’s like you’re just in a bad mood and all because you weren’t rested well enough. So if you want to design a perfect day, start by making sure that you are getting to bed on time. That you’re not watching TV all night and that you’re getting those eight hours of sleep. So it starts with having a good evening routine.
The next thing that you want to do to design a perfect day is make sure that you start your day off in a great way. And there’s lots of people that talk about morning routines. And some people have super complex routines, some not so complex. There is no right answer on this. But what is right is to have some type of structure to how you start your day. Think about your day. And you have most control over how the day starts and ends. It’s like all this stuff in the middle. That’s where the uncontrollable stuff can happen. So you want to exercise as much control as you can over the way your day ends and over the way your day begins to give you the best chance for success. And I’ll give you some ideas of what to include in the morning routine, but it’s up to you to choose the things that resonate most for you.
So one would be is to just sit there and ask yourself, “What is it that I want to achieve today? What do I want to achieve? When do I want to do it?” and make sure that that is all correctly reflected in your schedule. So having a plan for the day and just visualizing how will this day unfold? And how will me showing up at my best behave in each of those moments? And see the day in your mind’s eye before the day actually even begins. Another great thing that you can do is practice some affirmations. So some simple positive statements about yourself that give you that energy and excitement and enthusiasm. Make you feel good about the day ahead.
So after you have a good evening routine in place such that you can get a good night’s rest. The next thing that I recommend you have in your day so that you have a great day, as close to a winning perfect day as possible, is just to have a good morning routine. And there’s lots of stuff out there that talk about different routines to try. And the most important thing is for you to pick and choose something that you think works for you. And I think at the root of it, there’s just a handful of things that are super valuable in a morning routine. And it’s just quite simply having a plan for your day, so taking a moment to just review your day. What am I doing when? And maybe perhaps visualizing how the day will go and how will you at your best behave in all of those moments. Try to see it in your minds eye.
Also would highly recommend that you start your day with some exercise. Get the blood flowing, get the energy flowing, get yourself in a positive mood. It really sets the tone for the rest of the day. And even if you feel like you don’t have time for it, the amazing thing is, is that if you get that exercise in, even if it’s just 10 minutes, 20 minutes, it actually gives you more energy so that you can work at an even higher rate of output throughout the day. You make up the time easily.
And then the last thing to consider as part of a morning routine, I’d recommend thinking about meditation. Some kind of meditation practice and it doesn’t need to be a big deal. You could start off with one minute. One minute of breathing deeply, eyes closed, perhaps repeating the word “Relax” to yourself. But just getting yourself into a calm state, wiping the slate clean before the day begins. The third thing to help you design a perfect day, or in other words, to help you create as many winning days as possible is having some kind of plan for how you approach your workday. Again, lots of things that you could consider here. I’ll share some of the tips that I’ve used over the years that have really helped me.
One is I split my day up into two parts. So I have my maker time in the morning and my manager time in the afternoon. What does that mean? That means that in the morning when my energy is at its highest, I like to just do my creative stuff, where I’m not really working with other people as much. And in the afternoons when my energy is a little bit lower, that’s my manager time. So that’s when I’m interacting with others. So maker versus manager time is an incredibly powerful way to structure your day.
And then the other quick tip that I’ll give you is that as you’re working through your day, just always remember to single task. Work on one thing at a time before you move to that next thing. Because that’s been shown to help you reclaim up to two hours of your day that tends to be lost to jumping around to too many things and not sticking with things long enough, switching tasks too many times throughout the day. So try to single task. Work on things for longer blocks of time.
And then another thing that you can implement to help you create more winning days, to help you get close to that perfect day. Remember we can actually never achieve perfection but to help get you close, is to measure your day somehow. Measure your day. I have a very simple thing that I do at the end of the day. It starts at the beginning of the day and I say to myself, “Okay, I set an intention to do my best for the day”. And at the end of the day, I ask myself, “Well did I do my best today or not? Yes or no”. And if I did my best to give myself a W if I didn’t, I give myself an L. The L is for learn, not for loss.
And it’s a simple game that I play. I try to not have more than six L’s in a month so that I’m at an 80% or higher hit rate for the month and never two L’s in a row. So if I have a bad day, it’s okay, just means the next day it needs to be a rebound day. And I have that up on the wall so I could see my W’s and L’s and get a visual representation of how I’m doing at any point within the month.
And last but not least to help you create more winning days, I want you to think of a river of flexibility. So what do I mean by that? Well, picture the day as a river and the river has two banks. The one bank is structure. The other bank is spontaneity. If you overflow the structure bank, you end up in the land of rigidity. And if you overflow the spontaneity bank, you end up in the land of chaos. Neither of those positions are great to be in. They are very disruptive for others around you and probably will turn you into a miserable person. You don’t want to have so much structure that if something happens that derails your perfect day, you get super upset and you’re horrible to be around.
So you want to be able to bounce from bank to bank. A little bit of structure, you could still remain spontaneous when needed and you remain flexible. And that is so key for you having as many winning days as possible, because a winning day at the end of the day isn’t a day whereby you’ve achieved necessarily what you’ve planned. It’s where you’ve done your best despite your plans in the context of that day. And I’d love to hear from you. So don’t forget to leave a comment and a rating as well. And if you’d like to get a copy of my new book, The 3 Alarms, please head over to my website at ericpartaker.com. That’s E-R-I-C, ericpartaker.com, where you can pick up a free digital copy of my new best-selling book, The 3 Alarms.
