Automation is key to wellness habits. Arnold Schwarzenegger swears by this and is constantly harping about it in his newsletter. There’s a reason James Clear’s Atomic Habits seem to be part of every high achiever’s must-reads list and why high achievers often have some form of a wellness routine. There’s a plethora of other examples I could list here, but the point is, when it comes to my wellness I feel like I’ve automated most of the big things. I journal first thing every morning. Subsequently I workout and make it a goal to get through an entire water bottle. When I end my workout I take my collagen and finish my water bottle. When I break my fast, I have my supplements lined up and ready like an assembly line before I consume my first bites.
For the most part, I’m doing more wellness than most of my peers and I hit my main pillars of wellness everyday. However, with how crazy this year has been I’ve noticed some habits starting to slip and my wellness is slipping with it. In an effort to reign in my life, I am trying a new set up for my Bullet Journal to get more granular and clear about when and how I’m going to fit in my wellness habits in because I’m in dire need of revisiting some fundamentals and regaining control of my wellness. I figured as I give this a whirl, I’d document this process so others can try replicating this system and implementing it for their own wellness.
The Details of the New System
Ever since I learned about Bullet Journaling in 2017, I’ve been a fan and on and off Bullet Journaler. When I’m on my Bullet Journal game, I feel way more efficient. But there’s seasons where a Bullet Journal hasn’t always seemed necessary, until now. I’ve decided I want to really level up my day to day in order to get the results I want and so it was time to revamp my Bullet Journal.
As a slight tangent, I love being analog and written as often as possible. Anecdotally, I’ve never liked digital calendars. I think they can be necessary for collaboration and can work, but personally I’ve never gotten on board with time blocking and have always preferred to limit notifications. All that to say, since this experiment is to revamp my personal wellness, efficiency, and productivity to goals I have, I’m going to try analog since it’s worked for me in the past. I do use to do list notifications on my phone when I need to make sure I’m doing something at a specific time, but I'm going to give this analog a try since I know I adhere to analog systems better than digital.
All that to say, let’s get granular about this process so it is replicable and more easily identifiable what needs revisiting and revision.
Why I’m Doing This
I noticed over the past couple months that I’m just scrambling through the day and I feel like I’m not accomplishing what I want to accomplish and have no time to implement the things I want to implement.
I thought I was doing fine keeping up with my workouts, my daily journaling, and my supplements, but it all began to feel like things were slipping and I was getting too relaxed about my wellness and in order to restore the chaos I needed to be a little more disciplined and intentional than I have been.
What I’m Changing
Before, I used to layout my Bullet Journal with the left hand page being a visual of my Week at a Glance when it came to big events in work and personal life and then use the right hand page as a daily task check off or notes. This worked great for me in the beginning of my Bullet Journaling days and how my schedule was when I began Bullet Journaling.
I’ve never really tried time-blocking, so I’m going to adapt a time-blocking type of system to my Bullet Journal and see if it helps me be a little more efficient with my tasks because if I see that I have it broken down into manageable chunks and have a different task I need to get done coming up, I’m hoping my brain will be more incentivized to stay focused and get what needs to be done quicker so we can complete a task before moving on to the next one.
How I’m Implementing This
I read Ed Mylett’s book The Power of One More and he introduced me to this idea of winning the day by dividing up your day into 3 periods. (Side note: Highly recommend the book, it was actually one of the most thought provoking and action oriented self-help books I’ve read.)
So what I’ve done is I’ve expanded my weekly spread essentially into an analog version of a week view of my calendar. I divided the page into 8 sections: one for each day of the week and the last section for my food for the week.
Note: I find it helps me list out my food for the week when I’m not doing a meal kit so I make sure I’m using my groceries and not overbuying groceries. It takes a lot of mental energy for me to decide what to eat and I don’t like to meal prep so if I at least have a loose idea of what I’m eating each day written down it can help me make sure I’m eating my groceries.
Then I wrote down each hour between 5 am-9pm on the left most part of the page and then I filled in my calendar like you would if you were to time block on a digital calendar. I’m hoping that by deciding in advance how I can batch similar tasks and having it visually displayed in an analog format that this will allow me to be more efficient and allow me to make time for wellness activities like reading and meditation that I want to do, but can’t seem to find the time for. I’m also hoping that seeing all that I have to get done off a screen will help me to stay away from scrolling on a screen.
Automate Your Wellness + Make Wellness a Daily Non-Negotiable Appointment = Recipe for Success
One of the best pieces of advice in wellness is to make your wellness as non-negotiable as a doctor’s appointment. Truly, these daily wellness habits are just as important as a doctor's appointment. Daily wellness habits can even be the antidote to a doctor's appointment.
So, by blocking what I have to get done for work and time blocking my wellness, I’m hoping I’ll be more direct and intentional about making sure I’m getting all the wellness in throughout my day as I’m trying to get everything else done in my life too.
Although most of my main wellness non-negotiables were already automated my system needed a reset and some refinement. No matter how well-oiled your machine might be, it never hurts to keep examining, experimenting, and improving upon ourselves!