A 10 minute night time routine guaranteed me to be successful
By: Asif Shaikh
Tags: Productivity, Morning Rituals, Morning Routines, Performance, Morning

A 10 minute night time routine guaranteed me to be successful

I know a lot of people who do not have a plan while going to bed. They have often asked me, “What plans do I need for going to bed, Asif?”. Well, here’s the answer.

While training people to become world-class in what they do, I emphasize that my clients have a morning routine of a world-class performer. Here’s what a plan should cover:

Know that it is going to be a great day

Anticipate the success

Be so excited you almost can’t sleep

You know EXACTLY what is going to happen

Be mentally committed to details and specific actions and know the outcomes

Have everything set up

Completely remove all friction and decision-making when you get up in the morning

Instead, this is what mornings of most people look like –

Wake up, irritated to a terrifying, loud alarm tone

Crawl out of bed. Find you are late for work.

Panic!

Brush, hurry, take a bath, tumble out of the bathroom

Wear whatever’s ready given the emergency at hand

Leave for work

By mid-day wonder what are you doing with your life

Get called into a meeting you didn’t need to attend

Crawl back home, tired, trying to sleep, staring at the ceiling

Promise yourself to make changes to your life the next day

Engage yourself into watching social media feed scrolling/GoT/Inferno/Whatever the latest fad designed to get your attention

Wake up, irritated to a terrifyingly loud alarm tone

So how do you adopt a morning routine that set’s you up for success?

Know that it is going to be a great day

You will wake up to absolute certainty. You will not be struggling to decide whether to snooze for another 5 mins or give in to the relentless alarm clock. This saves you from expending cognitive energy because your brain knows exactly what you are going to do. You lay it all out the night before, Where does it all begin? How you prepare for it the night before.

The key is to take out the stuff that could potentially prevent you from having a fantastic morning.

Stanford psychologist BJ Fogg says, “Design trumps willpower”. Think about it for a minute. It’s powerful!

If you design your life towards the habits you want to build or change, you take away your willpower’s power [couldn’t help the pun] to give in to any temptation.

For example: If you keep chocolates in your fridge, you are probably going to eat them. But if you keep chocolates on your kitchen table top, the chances of you eating them skyrocket!

Human behaviour generally defaults to what is most convenient. As a species, we often tend to follow the path of least resistance.

When something is easy and convenient (planned well), we do not need to fight our own instincts, you can act freely.

The good news? You can leverage this to your benefit!

This could be as simple as placing a piece of dental floss on your bathroom counter, next to the sink. Author BJ Fogg has found that this increases the chances of your flossing dramatically.

Despite knowing that flossing is beneficial, most people don’t floss, that includes me. This boils down to too much decision fatigue involved. There are too many decisions to be taken, too many steps involved in getting to the part where you floss. Creating a habit is difficult if there is friction involved, I probably won’t even do it.

So in this example of flossing our teeth every night, what is the “friction”?

Having to open a drawer

Look for the floss

Measure the right size of floss

Decide where to start

While these micro-actions take only 5–10 seconds to execute, they are incredibly taxing on to a person’s will power over a longer period.

Imagine another scenario, when I walk into the bathroom, see a piece of perfectly cut dental floss waiting next to the sink. I would almost instinctively just pick it up and start flossing.

So in this case, the decision to floss was already made based on the situation at hand. When you put the dental floss there, I made the decision to floss. It now influences my immediate behaviour. All I need to do is execute.

There’s a strong correlation of decision fatigue with willpower. They are almost interchangeable.

Our mind is weighed by the burden of making a decision. This slowly wipes off the willpower making us vulnerable to temptations. The temptation would be to

Eat those chocolates instead of passing them up

To skip the gym or to go for a workout

Wake up at 5 am instead of hitting the snooze button

In every scenario, I can see myself am moving back and forth between decisions. I don’t actually know what I am going to do.

Am I going to eat those chocolates? Who knows

Will I go to the gym or not? Who knows

Will I wake up the first time the alarm rings? Who knows

I certainly don’t know. And this is how willpower gets exhausted. The cognitive load can be reduced by

Making the first decision that comes to mind

Making a decision beforehand, turning the whole process into a workflow

via GIPHY

By making a decision, you remove the alternative options. The internal fight, contradicting thoughts. “Should I do it?”, “Would it work?”, “Am I doing it right?”, “What would they think about me?”, all the self-talk that has kept you from getting where you want to be.

The mindset that you take a decision in also matters. Decisions taken while laying in bed, in a groggy and cosy or semi-unconscious state do not have enough motivation behind them. In a state like this, if we haven’t already decided what we are going to do, and set up conditions to make it happen, then we actually don’t know what we’re going to do.

This is why having power, consistency and motivation behind our decisions could be so random. This happens because decision fatigue sets in.

The crucial night before

This makes the night before every morning really crucial to do the planning. Making a “cognitive commitment” as Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer calls it.

This means you write it down. When you are going to wake up and the top 1–3 things you intend to accomplish with your morning.

Once you have written down the priorities for the next morning. Now you need to get to work removing all friction.

You need to set everything up the night before so that you wake and up literally get moving, there shouldn’t be anything else to do or get distracted with.

If you plan to go for a run in the morning, keep your running shoes by the bed.

If there’s an important meeting you need to go to, keep the clothes laid out by the door.

If you need to write, keep a notepad and pen ready.

Everything that you need to achieve the next day, needs to be a part of your morning routine checklist.

All the micro-decisions involved act as friction and add to decision fatigue. You will have several things to do. That is the reason you don’t floss your teeth regularly even though you think you should. This reduces your chance of getting out of bed with the mindset of a warrior.

Having an amazing morning routine is one of the best things you can do in your life. There are too many super achievers I know and follow who would vouch for having a terrific morning routine. Since implementing it in their lives, even my clients swear by it.

If you get really good at morning routines, you’ll experience a huge shift in your life. In reality, with a solid morning routine, you could quickly become “successful” at whatever it is you want to do.

Once you get used to an amazing morning routine, you start to live your life on purpose. Your default choices take you closer to your objectives.

You can start meditating, visualising and strategically planning your goals.

You start producing more, be more creative and aren’t even tired by it all.

You begin to see more success because your brain is tuned to notice things you couldn’t see before.

There’s a clarity in things that you haven’t seen before.

Most people are far less effective than they could be because their brain is simply on autopilot, responding to whatever is happening in their environment.

We can counter this by spending our downtime, usually in the evenings, taking 10 minutes to decide what we are going to do the next morning and putting everything in place. It’s really that simple.

Here’s what you need to do –

Reiterate to yourself the night before what time you need to get up, you’ll soon not be needing that alarm clock.

Have a few key objectives for the morning.

Set up everything that you will need to achieve the objectives. You shouldn’t have to waste mental energy during your morning.

If you aren’t motivated to wake up in the morning and get to your objective, it’s because you failed the night before. You made it hard on yourself. You set yourself up for failure.

The more micro-steps you have to complete to BEGIN your morning activities, the less likely you are to do them. You cannot be making these decisions laying in bed in the morning.

Make the decision the night before. Put everything in place so that it’s convenient and mindless. Start doing this every day and watch what happens.

Your behaviour, motivation and confidence will change.

When you start making decisions that propel you towards your objectives, you stop having to deal with decision fatigue.

You operate how you want to operate.

You will have a momentum going which you will want to keep up. You will start living your life instead of wondering “What am I going to do?”.

Excited?

Every night when I go to bed, I’m like, “Tomorrow morning is going to be amazing.”

And then I wake up several hours later and I am like, “Let’s go!”

Then I execute. Over time, there’s huge progress.

After all, my life is in my hands. I have to make a decision.