How to Start a Daily Routine You Will Actually Stick To

by - September 14, 2019
Creating a daily routine is a method you can use to be more productive. But if you can't stick to the routine, then it's not going to help you be more productive, right? In this post, I tell you how I created my daily routine, and how you can use these easy tips to create a routine that is right for you!

How to Start a Daily Routine You Will Actually Stick to

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Updated for 2024


How to Start a Daily Routine You Will Actually Stick To

You start out the year sticking to your daily routine every single day. You push yourself really hard to make sure that you do everything on your daily routine at the correct time, in the correct order.

Then you have a hard day and what happens? You miss doing one thing on your routine and then the next day after that it is just as easy to miss it again, and again, and again. Pretty soon you aren't doing it at all. Well, there goes all of your New Year's goals. Maybe next year.

You don't want this to happen!


Testing My Daily Routine

Making a daily routine doesn't have to be super challenging unless you want to make some big changes to what you normally do throughout the day. If you start small, then it makes it a lot easier.

Before I created my daily routine bullet journal layout, I tried out the different ways I could make my daily routine. This helped me a lot.

I started out by seeing what my regular day was like, so I could decide where I wanted to put different tasks I wanted to add to my daily routine.

I definitely recommend testing out your daily routine before just jumping right into setting it in stone before even trying it out to see if you will like it or be able to do it.

Some things you might want to add to your daily routine are...

  • Exercise
  • Cleaning up Before Bed
  • Washing Dishes Right After the Meal
  • Cleaning up After Lunch
  • Morning Routine
  • Night Routine
  • Planning in Planner or Bullet Journal
  • Journalling
  • Work Hours
  • School Hours
I have seen a bunch of bullet journal layouts that show morning and night routines, but I thought that would be just another page to add so I decided to add my morning and night routine right onto the daily routine page, so I can see at a glance what I want my daily routine to look like.

For my daily routine, I knew that I wanted to stretch every day, so I thought about when the best time would be to do it, and then I tried it out for a few days to make sure that I liked doing it in the morning.

How to Start a Daily Routine You Will Actually Stick to


Making My Daily Routine Bullet Journal Layout

I am not a big fan of time-blocking. I know that it works for a lot of people, but for me, it feels too restrictive and then I become bored. Instead, I like to do one thing after another. So, I knew for my bullet journal layout, that I wanted it to not have times on it.

So, for my routine, I just added a wake-up time and a certain time that I want to be in bed by and this so far has been working for me.

As you can see in the picture above, I have a column in the middle of the page, with colored blocks in the center. This is just an estimate since I don't have any exact times on this. I added noon in the center, and then I added my morning routine at the top with bullet points and my night routine at the bottom with more bullet points.

Below are the steps you can take to make your daily routine bullet journal layout.

  1. Add a header. I really like the sun I added to mine. :)
  2. Make a column going down the center of the page. I made mine two boxes wide.
  3. Add your wake up, lunch, and night times if you want to. I made sure that I added noon right in the middle, so I knew how much room I had to write before and after lunch information.
  4. Add in morning and night routines. I added in my morning and night routines with bullet-pointed lists, so I didn't have a bunch of small lines right next to each other.
  5. Add in everything else. Then I started adding in everything else going from the top to the bottom.
  6. Color in the blocks. After that, I colored in the blocks and did the lettering with a black sharpie pen. (I draw in almost all of my layouts in pencil first.)

The supplies I used for this layout are as follows.

  • A Sharpie Pen
  • A Mechanical Pencil
  • A Crayola Super Tip Marker
  • A Circle Protractor for the Plate

This was a fairly easy layout to make even though it took a long time to make because I had to figure out what my daily routine was. I enjoyed adding in the doodles and I love how they make the layout look!

You might have noticed that I only used two colors in this layout: black and pink. I like to think of my layouts as minimalist even though I use doodles and calligraphy in them! I see a lot of the two-color layouts on Pinterest, and I love how clean and simple they look, so I have been making quite a lot of two-color layouts.

How to Start a Daily Routine You Will Actually Stick to

Update - This is a picture of what my daily routine for the 2020-2021 school year bullet journal layout looks like. My one from last year worked well, so I did the same type of set up. :)


Making My Daily Routine Work

I make my daily routine work, by just doing my best to do it, but if I miss a day, I will focus on making sure that I do it the next day. It is better to miss one day and then do it the next day, then to force yourself to do it every single day for a month before giving up.

In the long run, you want to turn your daily routine into habits. It doesn't matter if you miss one day as long as you try doubly hard the next day to make sure that you don't miss two days in a row. That is when it turns into a habit. I do the same thing for my habit tracker. If I miss for one day, I tell myself it's okay that I am not getting a perfect streak, and then I make sure I do it the following day.

There are going to be days when you will be under the weather, or have a change in plans, and that is okay.


How to Start a Daily Routine You Will Actually Stick To

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How to Start a Daily Routine You Will Actually Stick to

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