On day seven, I'm focusing on creating a daily routine that helps you to step away from the office and define your day in a structured way; this feels particularly important as more of us work from home.
On day seven, I'm focusing on creating a daily routine that helps you to step away from the office and define your day in a structured way; this feels particularly important as more of us work from home.
Hi there, I'm Diner Liver . Thanks so much for joining me on my podcast. And this month I'm focusing on mindset, and I've created this series of 10 short podcasts just to talk about a few different angles of mindset and how we can take back our focus and our control of it by looking at where we are focusing our energy. Today, I wanted to talk about how important routine can be, and routine plays an enormous part in our mindset 2020, if nothing else has shown us that we had to throw many of our routines out the window and start new ones. And it's interesting how many people I've spoken with whose old routines, many of which had been in place for a long, long number of years, are not things they've actually missed. And it's like they've said, you know, I was doing a lot of those things just because I'd always done them, not in a way that was mindful, not in a way that was about realizing that I perhaps had a choice in some of these routines. And so I would encourage you to think, what are the routines I've let go of and what can I replace them with? You know, another side effect or symptom of so many people working from home for the first time is knowing how to distinguish between their workday and their home life. I know a lot of people who say, I , I'm working way longer days than I used to, but when you talk to them about what they're achieving during those days, quite often it's not any more . In fact, sometimes it's less than they would've achieved in those number of hours previously. And the reason for that is because actually they don't have a routine. And as a result, and we've, we've all done it, if you really look at where have the hours in the day been spent, they're not really being spent on things that are useful or helpful or necessary much of the time. Now, a routine from somebody who doesn't believe there is a box sounds odd, doesn't it? Somebody asked me recently, you claim to, to think in this totally different way. I would never think you would follow other people's rigid way of doing things. And yet you are a member of a , a , a networking organization that follows a very structured approach. And that's BNI. Um, and my answer to that was, well, yes, because that's the kind of structure I do love. My career, my working life started in big corporates. And so I knew what my role was. I knew my job description, my person specification. They'd been very clear about what was expected from me, and I knew that I had certain jobs that had to be done every day, every week, every month, or every year. And those were scheduled and they formed my role. Well move forward to working as an entrepreneur or running a small team on your own. And suddenly those rules and those structures don't exist. And so it's really easy to spend your time either doing things that perhaps somebody else used to do for you, and so you're not great at them, or you take a while longer to do them, or to spend time actually questioning yourself and thinking, should I really be doing all these things? Is this the right way to invest my hours today? And so, while I'm not suggesting I have the solution for <laugh> exactly how you should invest your business hours, what I would encourage you to do is to have a routine for the start and end of your working day. And this isn't just about you, this is also for your family or your friends or whoever you share your living space with. I remember spending many years being very frustrated with my mother-in-Law. That's another conversation. No, seriously , um, who meant incredibly well and was regularly contacting me just to check in and see how things were. But I was irritated because she was phoning during my working day, and that didn't work for me. That didn't suit me . And then I realized I'd never actually told her what time would suit me. You see, when we set a routine in place, we don't just help ourselves to adjust and to turn off and say, right now it's time for my friends or my, my downtime, we help them as well. So today, really that is it for me. It's, it's that creating of a routine that allows you to say, I'm in control of my day. I can decide to stop at a certain time and
Speaker 2:Turn everything off and move outta that office space. You just have to believe it's your mindset to do so. And by the way, if you are thinking, oh goodness, now I've got to start my day with ing and yoga and stretching, and whatever works for you. It doesn't have to be what anybody else does as a routine. It's whatever feels right for you. But if you don't put it in place, you're just not gonna do it. I hope you've enjoyed the podcast today. I'd love you to share it, and I'd love you to join me tomorrow for my eighth in the series when I'm going to share some of the things that I regularly use to boost my mood and help me reframe my mindset on challenging days. Oh, and before I go, just one quick thing. Stop trying to think outside that box . It's not there . Bye .