Evening Routines to Improve Daily Clarity and Productivity

Learn why an evening routine is important and how to create an evening routine for success!

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My last blog post was all about morning routines. What is the best way that you can win the morning and have a really productive day?

Here’s a secret that few entrepreneurs know and even fewer practice: great mornings begin the night before! Evening routines are important because they prepare you for a productive morning.

I'm going to share with you some tips and tricks on how to create an evening routine so that your morning goes exactly as you plan it.

Before we get started, you may ask why a strategist and operations expert is talking about morning and evening routines? Well, I have used these routines for most of my career, and I still do as a work-from-anywhere entrepreneur, to ensure that I have productive workdays. Even on non-work days, I try to stick to my routines as much as possible because I find that they help me be calm and centered.

Let’s talk about why we need an evening routine. For most of us, evenings are supposed to be times when we are shutting down when we're recovering from work and spending time with our loved ones. Why do we need to think about getting ready for the next day?

Benefits of an Evening Routine

Here are a few benefits of having an evening or nighttime routine:

First, it helps prime our minds and bodies for restful sleep. Our sleep is so important to our health overall, but it is also important to our businesses since most entrepreneurs are doing some form of creative work every day. We need to recharge our brains while we're sleeping.
Second, by doing some of the prep work for the morning the night before, an evening routine allows us to enter that next day with a sense of peace and calmness. When we do that, we can focus better and we can have more productive days.
When we put thought into the next day’s schedule and, most importantly, our big 2-3 tasks to accomplish when we wake up, we are taking the guesswork and the possible loss of productivity out of our mornings. When you plan your morning, you can start your day with focus. You can hit the ground running but calmly and peacefully, as we talked about in the last blog post.
Finally, if you follow the bonus tip in this article, you can even use your sleeping time to help you with challenges or questions that you may be struggling with!

Elements of a Nighttime Routine

As with the morning routine, a nighttime routine must be customized and include those elements that work for you. Here are some evening routine ideas to consider:

Plan Your Bedtime:

This probably sounds like a no-brainer! It is, but when was the last time you intentionally thought of what time you needed to go to bed to allow yourself enough sleep to wake up and start your day in that productive manner? Perhaps before a big day or before you had an early meeting, but do you think about your bedtime intentionally each night?

Once you set a bedtime, try to stick to it as much as possible so you are priming your body for restful sleep that occurs at the same time each night. Studies have shown that good sleep hygiene includes a stable bedtime each night.

Prepare Your Clothes and Lunch the Morning:

Your goal with this element is to streamline your mornings, remove decision fatigue and remove the possibility that you will talk yourself out of good habits through mental negotiation.

If you are going to the gym or going to work out in the morning, lay out your clothes the night before or pack your gym bag. If you have your workout clothes laid out in front of you, you will likely just put them on and get going. If you don’t, this requires an extra step in the morning and may make you think twice about going.

If you’re going in to work and need to dress appropriately, select and iron your work clothes the night before. Likewise with your lunch/snacks for the day ahead. If you can make them the night before, you are more likely to eat healthy during the day ahead and less likely to make poor food choices.

One final thing that I do every night is to prepare my coffee maker! Each night I have the coffee pot filled and set to brew automatically so I can wake up to a steaming hot, fresh-brewed cup of coffee or three.

Prepare Your Workspace:

If you work from home, or just plan to use some of your morning time for creative work, make sure that your workspace is set up, organized and ready to go so that you can start your day calmly and productively.

Meditate and/or Pray:

Did you know that research shows that it’s best to meditate twice a day? Once in the morning to clear the mind and prepare for the day and once in the afternoon or evening to help remove the stress of the day and calm your mind for relaxation and sleep. It's actually that second meditation of the day, that can be more cathartic, more releasing of stress and anxiety, than even the morning meditation can be.

I like to pray when I meditate and so it's for me, it's one practice. Gabby Bernstein who is a spiritual teacher and author says, "prayer is the time to ask for what you need and meditation is the time to listen" for those answers.

Journal:

Another element of an evening routine can be journaling, although experts recommend that you approach journaling in the evening a little bit differently than journaling in the morning.

Journaling in the morning, if you've watched our morning routine video, should release your creativity, thoughts, challenges, stressors or anxieties. The recommendation that I’ve read or heard on morning journaling is that it is best to do it by hand.

At the end of the day, your brain is more analytical and tends to be a little more focused and so this is a great time to note the accomplishments of your day and your positive experiences.

When you start noting your accomplishments and the positive experiences that you had throughout the day, you begin to notice more positive events in your life.

In addition to positivity, when you note the accomplishments of the day, it builds confidence in your abilities. According to the book called "The Gap and the Gain" by Benjamin Hardy, PhD, and Strategic Coach founder Dan Sullivan, many people tend to focus on the gap in their work. That is, what they wanted to get done compared to what they actually accomplished.

For example, maybe you plan to do five things today and you only got three done. Well, the reality is you got three done that you hadn't accomplished the day before. You should focus on the accomplishments (the GAIN) versus what you didn’t get done (the GAP). Unfortunately, we are naturally programmed to focus on the GAP and need to take a few steps to pivot our focus to the GAIN.

Personalize and Customize

Just like our morning routines, I suggest that you personalize the night routine or evening routine to make it fit you. Select the elements that you like and test them out. Also, test the order of how you get them done and then choose the time frame that fits.

For example, if you tend to be more creative in the evening and you're a night owl, you might be doing your evening routine at midnight or later. I am usually asleep by 10 pm, so my routine will occur much earlier in the evening.

Bonus Tip:

Thomas Edison is famous for journaling at night and, in particular, asking questions of his subconscious. He is believed to have said, “never go to sleep without a question to your subconscious.”

Edison believed that your subconscious works while you're sleeping. Your subconscious can be creative and help you to solve problems, challenges or struggles in your life that you're facing while you are sleeping.

If you journal your question or journal in general about the challenges that you're having before going to sleep, you're priming your subconscious to do some work while you're sleeping. In some cases, this is how people have had creative breakthroughs. Sometimes those breakthroughs happen in the morning, and other times they happen later in the day or on a different day entirely.

It is an interesting concept to try because, as entrepreneurs, we always have more to do than there are hours in the day. So why not let our subconscious do some of that thinking for us?

“Win the Morning” Checklist

I have a free download to remind you of all the tips and elements of both morning and evening routines that will help you “win the morning” so that you can “win the day!” Remember, the morning sets your intention and sets the pace for the rest of the day, so we want to win the morning, and the way we win the morning is, in part, through our evening routines.

Leave me a comment or contact me if you have other elements that you include in your morning or evening routines. I would love to hear your thoughts!

Categories: : Focus, Habits, Productivity, Strategy