With the year coming to an end, you might be looking forward to building new habits and setting new goals.
Developing a daily routine has helped me a lot — both in achieving my goals and improving my mental health. I used to have terrible time management, a lack of healthy habits, and irregular sleep until my mid-twenties. Now I call myself a creature of habit.
Developing a routine for myself didn’t happen overnight, so don’t feel bad if you can’t completely turn around your life in a single day.
I think having a routine is especially important for people who lack structure in their day, e.g. self-employed and unemployed people. With a daily routine, I’m less likely to become overwhelmed and spend hours doom scrolling on social media while stuck in ADHD paralysis. I can simply go through my checklist and do the tasks I need to do one by one.
Until recently, I had been using a physical notebook to write down my daily tasks, but I noticed most of the tasks I would write down on my daily to do list were recurring. I was tired of writing a long daily to do list every day, so I decided to look for a digital solution. I played around with various to do list apps, but none had the features I wanted or were unnecessarily complicated. Many of the apps also had a monthly subscription fee. So I made my own daily routine spreadsheet with Google Sheets, which you can use for free.
Features:
✅ Easy to clear checkboxes to reuse for the next day
✅ Highlights “do next” task and greys out completed tasks
✅ Customizable colours and header text
✅ Build daily habits to achieve your goals
✅ Record affirmations, gratefulness, and glimmers to develop a positive mindset
The spreadsheet is very customizable. I like to have my goals, affirmations & gratefulness, glimmers, and Substack post ideas all on the same tab as my daily tasks:
[Notice that the habits I included in my daily routine are aligned with my goals.]
You can make your copy look like mine by adding new columns on the main tab instead of having the different parts in different tabs. The default template will have sections spread across multiple tabs since having everything in the same tab will create complications when adding and deleting rows from your task list. But if you’re familiar with Google Sheets and don’t mind shifting data around when adding and deleting rows, then feel free to arrange your tabs like mine.
As a heads up, if you struggle with ADHD, then you probably struggle to get started on tasks that require multiple steps. So adding a task like “clean the kitchen” to your daily routine may be more overwhelming than helpful until you’ve mastered the habit of cleaning up the kitchen. At first, you may need to break “clean up the kitchen” into multiple smaller steps, such as 1) put away stuff on the countertops, 2) put dirty dishes into the dishwasher, 3) wipe down countertops. I’ve only mastered this habit somewhat recently, and what used to be an overwhelming task can now be done without much thought.
Perhaps I will share a separate guide to keeping your home tidy in the future, since I used to struggle massively with a messy home, but I just wanted to share my Daily Routine Template with you for now with the new year approaching.
Have fun with it!
P.S. The template is completely free to use, but you can tip me on my Ko-Fi if you find it helpful.