Today’s post is all about daily habits to improve your life. But not necessarily big, life-changing habits. Instead, I want to talk about some small daily habits you can start implementing that do a lot to improve your life. Not only making life easier now. But also setting your future self up for success too!
Today, let’s focus on some simple habits you can implement at home to help your home function better and your days run smoother. Daily habits that are quick, simple and realistic to fit into your days and your schedule. But will do a lot to make life at home and in general easier!
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Daily habits to keep up with the basics
Building strong, consistent habits for the daily tasks involved in running a home can be so helpful. The basics needed to keep your home functioning well. Things like keeping up with the dishes, keeping up with the laundry and keeping your house tidy overall.
Today’s post isn’t focusing on deep cleaning. But rather focusing on the little things you can do each day to keep your home under control and functioning well.
And why building good daily habits will not only improve your life now but also set you up for success in managing your home in the future too!
Daily habits on auto-pilot
The key to building strong daily habits is staying consistent with them so they happen almost automatically.
This makes life easier because by reducing the number of decisions you’re making each day to do the basics. Tasks get done each day almost on auto-pilot without a lot of extra planning, thinking, remembering, etc. required.
They are built into your daily rhythm in such a way that you keep up with daily tasks almost automatically.
The more automatic these basic tasks and habits become the more brain power you free up for other things that are more important to you.
In his book, Atomic Habits, author James Clear says, “Habits do not restrict freedom. They create it.”
Basically, strong daily habits set you up now and, in the future, to have more freedom to do the things that are more important to you. Rather than getting bogged down doing the tasks of day-to-day life that don’t bring you joy or fulfillment.
Clear goes on to say, “If you’re always being forced to make decisions about simple tasks – when should I work out, where do I go to write, when do I pay the bills? – then you have less time for freedom. It’s only by making the fundamentals of life easier that you can create the mental space needed for free thinking and creativity.”
Set your future self up for success
Not only do strong daily habits help improve your life now. They also set you up for success in the future too. Making life easier in the future, as well as today.
Strong daily habits help ensure the basic tasks happen more easily. Helping you ensure that in the future, you won’t be dealing with yesterday’s mess or the tasks you didn’t get done today.
Giving you more capacity and opportunity to enjoy life more in the future because you’re staying caught up on the basic daily tasks required in your home.
In Atomic Habits, Clear says, “When you have your habits dialled in and the basics of life are handled and done, your mind is free to focus on new challenges and master the next set of problems. Building habits in the present allows you to do more of what you want in the future.”
Having strong daily habits is like choosing to act in favour of your future self.
When thinking about how your daily habits could impact your future self, ask yourself what you can do now to make life easier later. Ask yourself if your actions today will have a positive or negative impact on your future self. Think about how you can best set yourself up for more success and ease in the future.
For example, how will doing the dishes today impact your mind, emotions, stress level, etc. tomorrow? It feels good to wake up to a clean kitchen and start the day fresh. It doesn’t usually feel good to wake up to a sink full of dirty dishes and yesterday’s mess to deal with before the day has barely started.
Prepare your space for future use
Clear says, “The purpose of resetting each room is not simply to clean up after the last action, but to prepare for the next action.”
He shares the example of a man named Oswald in Atomic Habits who has built the habit of resetting his spaces as soon as he’s done using them. Oswald says, “When I walk into a room everything is in its right place. Because I do this every day in every room, stuff always stays in good shape…People think I work hard but I’m actually really lazy. I’m just productively lazy. It gives you so much time back.”
Daily habits to improve life: real-life examples
Now that you see the power of building strong daily habits, it’s time to figure out what this could look like in your own life. What kinds of basic daily habits can you build to improve life and make your home function better and run more smoothly?
I like to start with the basics. Think about what you need to do in your home each day to keep it under control and functioning well. Even if you don’t do anything else during the day, what are the basic things you need to do to stay on top of things?
For me, I have a set of morning and evening habits that I do each day. Even if I don’t do anything else during the day, keeping up with these basic morning and evening habits keeps our home tidy, functioning well and under control.
From there, you can build on your daily habits and go beyond the basics with weekly, monthly, seasonal and yearly chores and habits. But starting with a solid foundation of the basics helps keep your home running smoothly most of the time.
My basic daily habits
For me, my morning daily habits include:
- Unloading the dishwasher
- Starting a load of laundry
- Making the beds
- Resetting and tidying the bedrooms and bathrooms after we all get ready
- Wiping the bathroom counters and spraying the shower with my daily shower cleaner
- Cleaning up breakfast dishes and quickly wiping the table and counters
My evening daily habits include:
- Doing the dishes, wiping the counters and starting the dishwasher
- Doing a quick tidy and reset of the whole house (I usually aim to spend 10 – 15 minutes doing this)
- Folding and putting away the laundry
- Vacuuming the kitchen or any other space that needs it
- Getting the things we’ll need in the morning ready (packing lunches, getting backpacks organized, setting out our vitamins, etc.)
We all pitch in and help with these tasks which help us do them even faster.
Even if these are the only tasks I do at home in a day, our home still stays clean, tidy and functioning well. Of course, there are deeper cleaning tasks to keep up with too. But these daily habits keep the basics covered in between.
Making it easier to build these habits
If that sounds like a lot to keep up with, don’t worry! Like any habit, you build it over time and can also make it suit your needs, home, lifestyle, preferences, etc.
But there are a couple of tips to make it easier to build these daily habits.
Stay consistent
First, keeping up with your daily habits every day makes them easier to keep up with each day. The more consistently you do your daily habits, the less mess will build up in the meantime and the easier it is to get them done.
For example, if you keep up with the dishes each day, you’ll only have one day’s worth of dishes to deal with at the most. But if you let the dishes pile up for a few days, it’ll be a lot more work because you’ll have several days worth of dishes to do. And the food will be more dried on and harder to deal with!
And the great thing about staying consistent is how it sets you up for success even when life happens and you don’t get your daily tasks done. Because you keep up with things most days, if you miss a task here or there, it’s easier to catch back up without feeling completely overwhelmed or like you’ve lost the habit completely.
Simplify
And second, simplifying your home makes it a lot easier to keep up with these daily habits. Simply because when you have less stuff in your home, you have less to manage and take care of. Making it easier to get these daily tasks done.
Another way having less makes it easier to keep up with your daily habits is out of necessity. If you have less, you don’t give yourself the option of letting things pile up before you deal with them.
For example, if you have fewer dishes, you can’t just get a new plate every time you need one. Simply because you’ll quickly run out of clean plates. You’ll need to stay on top of the dishes so you actually have clean dishes available when you need them!
But also, because you have fewer dishes, even if every plate you own is dirty, it’s a smaller number of plates to deal with. It will feel less overwhelming to do the dishes because there will be fewer dishes to do!
The same idea can apply to other things in your house too.
For example, fewer clothes mean you have to stay on top of the laundry. But it also means your laundry won’t have a chance to pile up and feel completely overwhelming either.
Daily habits to improve life
I hope today’s post has helped inspire you to see the impact strong daily habits can have. And how building strong daily habits can go a long way toward improving your life!
Try starting small and getting in the habit of tackling one daily task consistently. Then add another task and another until your set of daily habits and tasks can happen almost on auto-pilot!
Do you have daily habits you do every day to keep your home and life feeling under control? What’s something you do every day? Leave a comment and let me know!
