Tracking discipline

Oftentimes I do things in my head when I should be writing them down. For example, I have my daily routine where I exercise and try to read a bit while balancing my family responsibilities and the fixed amount of time that I work on my business. In general, I take things by ear and just try to either: do my routine the same way each day, or if something is off, try to get back to what feels like the right amount.

However, I've seen results in structuring my work hours more systematically, by timeblocking my schedule to work on different important tasks and I feel like this type of systematic approach could improve my daily disciplines as well. So going forward I will keep a simple bullet-point checklist each day of several key disciplines and whether or not I did them. Then at the end of a week or month, I can look back and see how often I was able to stick to those things. It's not crazy, over the top organization but rather something that feels like an incremental and achievable add-on to what I'm already doing.

The initial disciplines that I will be tracking are:

• Daily wake up at 6:45am (as opposed to 7am or 7:15am which doesn't leave me much time to read before my son wakes up)
• Daily cold shower
• Weekday workout
• Don't let myself fall asleep on the couch during evening (as this hurts my actual nighttime sleep)

The workout and cold shower are already pretty ingrained into my schedule, but I haven't had as much time to read as I would like in the mornings and have been letting myself fall asleep on the couch too many times. By putting this down on paper I think I can work on those two things and get myself a bit more reading time and some better sleep at night. Let's see how it goes.