My routine

1. Wake Up: natural light, hygiene, vitamins, environment’s prepare (open/close/clean), put on charge devices, light stretch, check tracked stuff, PLAN your day, meditate.

   1.1 Light spaced repetition session.

2. Work Session: music, focus on high-priority tasks & limit time, break each 25-30min if needed, stay hydrated.

3. Lunch: Slow meal, digestion & walk, brainless time, my news, micro-sleep (max 30min).

4. Post-work: Wrap up tasks, review, commit, team communicate, prep for next day, self-promote and communicate.

5. After-work/Training: Light drink/snack, mental recovery, physical exercise, dinner, rest.

6. Learn & practice: programming, drawing, 3D (modeling, animation, printing), gamedev, photography, etc.

7. Full Relax: Read, watch, game, psychology, self-development, streams, low intensity to reset.

8. Planning: day/week/month review, cleaning.

9. Healthy Sleep: Sync with circadian rhythm, prep time for sleep, deep breathing, positive thoughts.

1. Wake up

• Go easy after wake-up, get (5-10mins) natural light in eyes within 1 hour of waking up.
• Washing my face with cold water and cleanser, brush teeth, clean tongue.
• Drink a glass of water and coffee, this helps to rehydrate after the sleep.
• Prepare workspace, fewer distractions improve my productivity.
• Put devices on charger - daily (phone, tablet, big headphones), weekly (e-reader, small headphones).
• Planning my day with Taskwarrior.
• 35 minutes of run session.
• Stretch or do light exercise if desired to wake up your body.

2. Work session

• Remove devices from charging if required, connect tokens.
• Disable distractions (dnd), prepare water, breath deeply and start. There was numerious times when I get some notification, which I won’t read now…
• Set “Working” music playlist.
• Warmup a little with easy tasks, then go to most important ones.
• Focus on main tasks, go from hard to easy or important to less important.
• Limit timing for tasks, to avoid go too deep, we can always go back and refactor/improve features.
• Take at least one 10–15 minutes break in this session.
• Drink more water to stay hydrated.
• Completeing this working session give me good emotional state.
• Pain is rewareded with pleasure, don’t be afraid to do something booring but really useful.

3. Lunch

• Slowly eat good meal, give time to food digestion.
• Walk a little-bit.
• This is brainless time, don’t try to do something important.
• After ~1.5 I’m usually falling into microsleep (max 30 minutes).

4. Post-work

Closing gaps, review my work and commit it, connecting with my team, and prepare me to the next day.

5. After-work session and training

Dinner time. I get some rest and recovery time. Maybe it’s good time for tea or some other drink with small amount of food.

I like to get some time to recover my mind. I’ll watch something or read something. But I’m not spending too much time on it. Full relax activity will be later.

After relax its good time to my physical exercise plan.ru, with tracking my progress and results, and get rest some time to recover.

6. Learn something new

This chunk is starting somewhere in the evening, when I get second wind. I learn according to learning techniques. I also mix learning and practice in one session.

One trick to get into learning mode is start and end this session with spaced repetition.

7. Full Relax

I may do full relax activity, like reading, watching movies, playing games, etc. Here important factor - I need to reset before additional braint activity, so don’t do something really energy consuming here.

8. Planning

• Clean up inboxes and to-do lists.
• Set priorities and create a to-do list for the next and upcoming days.
• Review goals and achievements for the week and months.
• Check your global goals.

9. Sleep

Sleep is key of productivity, synchronize with circadian rhythm clocks.

Don’t forget about yourself and don’t try to make longer your day (this is bad idea). Try to start sleep maximum at 00:00 (with some preparations before), breath deeply and keep thinking about something good.

Tips

Try to increase Dopamine through your daily routine, natural sources of dopamine:

• exercise;
• protein;
• reduce saturated fat;
• support gut health;
• sunlight;
• regular sleep;
• meditation;
• music.

Flashcards

Which natural dopamine boosters you know?
Exercise, protein, sunlight, sleep, meditation, music, gut health, less saturated fat.

First 3 tasks after waking up?
Get natural light, wash face/teeth, drink water.

Components of good morning?
sun, physical training, cold shower

Key principles for productive work session, 3-4 principles?
Remove distractions with DND mode, hard tasks first, take breaks, stay hydrated.

Main purpose of dinner break?
Proper digestion and mental reset.

Best time to start sleep?
Before 00:00 (ideal before 23:00) with preparation time.

How to start learning session with mine plan?
Begin with spaced repetition when second wind hits.