How to win the day

Published on March 5, 2023

A day is the smallest unit of progress in your life. We use it to postpone important tasks (“I’ll do it tomorrow”) or to get up nice and early, get things done and so on.

Living a day well, according to your own design, can give you a good year full of results and happiness.

Your life is today

A day is an interesting unit to examine. Every time you get up, it feels like a new start, a fresh chance to get your life back on track and reach your goals.

When you go to sleep, you’ve done everything you could for that day. The previous day, yesterday, is already over. There’s nothing you can do about it except learn lessons and adjust your course.

A day is also genuinely based on the cycle of nature and human beings: the day-night rhythm. The concepts of a seven-day week and a month were invented by people to give society structure.

Winning the week, month and year naturally follows from a series of successful days.

But how do you determine whether you’ve won the day? What makes a good day?

What is a successful day?

A successful day looks different for everyone. It’s important, though, to be able to determine objectively at the end of the evening whether it was a good day.

Why?

1. To feel good — You consciously pause to recognize your successes. That’s an enormous boost to your confidence and happiness.

2. To adjust your course — Once you head down the wrong path, you want to know as quickly as possible.

How can you do this? Through simple self-reflection, for example. A few questions you can ask and answer:

1. What am I grateful for?

2. What three things went well?

3. What is one thing that could have gone better today?

4. What will I try differently next time to achieve that?

What matters to you?

Ask someone what’s important and you’ll hear all kinds of things: family, sport, work, fitness, hobbies and so on.

What matters to you? Make a list.

What are the relative priorities?

The items on that list don’t exist in a vacuum. In practice, some things matter more than others, even if you aren’t aware of it.

An important assignment at work often comes at the expense of a hobby. When a family member needs help, that often comes before everything else.

How do you rank the things that matter to you, and does that ranking hold true in practice?

What we often see is that things we say matter aren’t as important in relative terms. Healthy eating often falls by the wayside.

When what we say is important differs from what our actions show is actually important, we can’t really call it a successful day.

So here’s some homework:

1. Rank your list of priorities.

2. Track your real priorities for a week. You can do this very simply by making seven columns and numbering each priority according to what you worked on first.

3. Decide whether you want to keep it that way. With this awareness, you can look at how to arrange your life differently. How can you make sure your priorities get attention in the right order?

Win the morning, win the day

“The early bird catches the worm.”

The morning is when you get things done.

There are a few reasons:

1. Nobody wants anything from you yet.

2. You’re fresh.

3. The decisions you make have lasting effects.

The decisions you make during the day don’t stand alone. Their effects carry forward! Some decisions even affect the next day, such as those influencing your sleep.

Nobody wants anything from you yet

In the morning, you’re free to set your own priorities. Nobody wants anything from you yet.

Remember, though, that we live in an attention economy. Everyone wants your attention to promote an idea, sell something or get you to click.

Be aware of this when arranging your morning. Think about how you use your phone, for example. Is it the first thing you touch in the morning? Do you open Twitter, Telegram or Instagram?

Then it might be a good idea to:

1. Charge your phone outside the room.

2. Use a physical alarm clock or smartwatch as your alarm.

3. Remain reachable for emergencies, for example by answering through your smartwatch or turning the volume up so you can hear the phone ringing from another room.

Your phone can be a wonderful tool or an enormous distraction. It’s up to you to arrange things as you want them.

Your decisions have lasting effects

The morning is so important because you start fresh, and because your decisions carry forward.

If you drink too much coffee or skip breakfast, you may feel the effects halfway through the afternoon.

If you wake up straight into too much stress, Instagram or Twitter, there’s a good chance you’ll have run out of energy by the end of the day. You only have a limited amount of willpower. You don’t want to waste it in the morning on unproductive things.

A successful day starts the night before

What does a successful morning look like for you? Prepare the day before.

Is exercising in the morning important to you? Make sure all your sports clothes or your gym bag are ready. Make what you want to do the easiest option. Then you won’t need to struggle the next morning, and things will flow naturally.

What do you need to make tomorrow a good day?

The night before, consider whether you have everything at home to make it a good day. It’s a little preparation.

I can easily imagine you don’t want to go grocery shopping after work every day just to eat healthily. Make sure those groceries are already at home.

The same applies to information you need. Look it up and have it ready.

Make parts of your day routine

Ideally, we’d make conscious decisions throughout the day about how we want it to look. That takes too much willpower, so it helps to make parts of the day routine.

This simply means always doing certain things in a particular way, to the point where you no longer have to think about them.

That gives you several benefits:

1. Willpower — Through making things routine.

2. Results — You want to keep doing things that work well in the same way. This helps secure those results.

What do you do every day?

Success can be reduced to the things you do every day. Take stock of your daily actions.

What do you do each day? Are you happy with it, or would you rather replace it with something else?

Try to build as much routine as possible around the things that lead to success.

Think about breakfast and preparations for work, for example.

What do you do every week?

There are often weekly tasks too, such as laundry or cleaning.

I also prepare food for the week on Sundays. That makes healthy eating easier, even when life gets busy.

Use today to make tomorrow easier

The principle is simple. When something happens that you hadn’t accounted for, you want to prevent it next time or have a contingency ready.

It’s a form of preparation, and you can use systems for it.

Design systems that work for YOU

Everything really comes down to systems. Why? Because everything reflects a concept from nature, and everything in nature works in rhythms. A system is simply a rhythm: logical cause and effect in an endless dance.

A system may sound complicated, but it isn’t. It’s just a sequence of connected actions. Isn’t everything in your life, right up to death, a sequence of actions?

Given that fact, you can design your own systems by:

1. Thinking about the starting point. We’re often unaware of the starting points of our actions. Do you have a routine when the alarm goes off, when it’s eight o’clock or after lunch at work? Use it!

2. Considering the logical next step. Have you returned from a run or from work? What do you do immediately afterward? Is that what you’d like to do, or is there a very small step toward something else?

3. Being aware that B follows A, however small the first action is. Celebrate taking the first action after your starting point as a small success.

An example of a system for winning the day

My goal is to write for my blog for an hour before work. How do I turn this into a system?

For me, this goal starts the night before. Making everything easier then makes starting easier in the morning.

My evening routine looks like this:

1. As soon as I notice it’s ten o’clock, I turn off my PC and put my phone on its stand on the breakfast table.

2. After putting my phone on the breakfast table, I get my mechanical keyboard and connect it with a USB cable.

3. After connecting my keyboard, I open the blog post I want to work on.

This lets me keep my morning routine very simple. It builds on this preparation and goes as follows:

1. After entering the living room, I get a glass of water.

2. After getting a glass of water, I turn on my phone and write five words for my blog post.

Start small

As you can see, the steps in the example above are described in very small terms, almost excessively small. The funny thing is that it works extremely well, because all those micro-wins add up. Every step is a mission accomplished.

What you can do now

Choose one concept and try it for a day. It can be as simple as starting to think about what a successful day looks like. A second step could be setting up one small system for the evening or morning.