A daily routine is an excellent way to keep track of your habits and day-to-day life. It can lead to better productivity, time management, and lifestyle balance, and help you get closer to achieving your goals.
However, building a daily routine from scratch can be difficult if it’s not something you’re familiar with. That’s where a daily routine template comes in handy.
With the daily routine template we’ve created, you can quickly get started tracking your habits and gain actionable insight into what works well for you and what doesn’t.
How We Came Up With This Daily Routine Template
This daily routine template was created by George Chasiotis, managing director at Minuttia and founder of GrowthWaves. George has five main goals in his life — to be happier, healthier, wealthier, wiser, and to have fun while helping others.
The thing is, it’s difficult to quantify what “happier” or “healthier” is. It’s subjective and difficult to track on a small, daily scale. So, George broke it down.
Swimming makes George feel happier, so he made ‘swimming more’ one of his goals as a vehicle to become happier.
Scrolling through social media, though, has the opposite effect, so setting a goal of ‘limiting social media time’ also makes him happier.
Better sleep, doing yoga, and running all contribute to George feeling healthier, and with this daily routine template, you can track all of these things.
Now, let’s take a look at why you should track your habits and daily routines.
What Are the Benefits of a Daily Routine?
Sticking to a daily routine has a huge number of benefits, ranging from stronger relationships and health benefits to improved productivity.
Improved mental health
A consistent daily agenda can help improve mood stability by giving you a greater sense of control over your daily life as well as an increased feeling of accomplishment and achievement as you cross things off your to-do list.
Furthermore, knowing what tasks lie ahead each day can help alleviate anxiety and stress, and the enhanced schedule structure makes it easier to concentrate, prioritize tasks, and remain focused.
Increased productivity and self-discipline
A set routine lets you better allocate your time and reduces procrastination. Plus, it helps you stay on track to meet your goals, both short- and long-term.
Additionally, routine fosters discipline and consistency in your daily activities, contributing to willpower and greater self-control. Performing the same tasks at the same time every day also helps with developing positive habits.
Better relationships
Instead of trying to shoehorn quality time with your friends and family into a chaotic weekly schedule, a daily routine allows you to set aside time for social activities, thereby ensuring meaningful interactions.
Include check-ins with loved ones when building your routine to improve connection and communication.
Balanced lifestyle
A well-thought-out routine can help you improve your work-life balance by making time for work, personal time, and social activities. Including hobbies and interests in your routine ensures you have time for the things that bring you joy and satisfaction, helping to prevent burnout.
Different Types of Daily Routine Templates and Trackers
When it comes to choosing how to create and track your daily routine, it’s important to choose the right one for you and your needs.
Here are some different types of daily routine templates and trackers that you could use:
- Bullet journal: A bullet journal is an efficient, flexible, and customizable way to track tasks, events, and goals. Start with a blank notebook and create sections using symbols denoting different types of entries, such as a bullet point for tasks, an asterisk for priority or important tasks, and an open circle for events. Bullet journals allow for a high level of personalization and function as a combination of a daily planner, diary, and to-do list. They offer a huge amount of customization depending on your preference. You can add stickers and different colors or keep things simple and minimalist.
- Calendar template: A calendar template is a pre-designed layout providing structure for a calendar. They can be customized to fit your needs and used for planning and organizing. Calendar templates come in different views including daily planning, a weekly planner, a monthly calendar, and a yearly plan. Depending on the view, calendar templates can be used as a class schedule, cleaning schedule, birthday reminder, meal planner, and daily routine tracker.
- Task list: A task list is essentially a to-do list where you add different tasks to a list and cross them off when you’re done. It can take the form of a paper list, but many of the best habit tracker apps include a task list in some form.
These apps let you add recurring daily tasks, specific times for tasks to be completed, reminders, and more and can make a task list more beneficial than a standard to-do list.
- Hourly schedule: Much like a task list, an hourly schedule is a daily to-do list but each item on the daily checklist is assigned a specific time. Using an hourly plan template is a good way to get started. Hourly planners are great for getting granular with your daily work schedule and provide a strict time- and project-management method.
How Does The Daily Schedule Template Work?
Our daily routine template is printable, editable, and can be accessed online as a digital planner.
The printable daily planner template features two worksheets: a daily tracker list template and a monthly tracker.
The daily tracker features five key results that you can track in five columns, with a different factor being tracked in each column, including:
- Yes answers to track when you did do something.
- No answers to track when you didn’t do something.
- A sum of round numbers for tracking goals like number of pages read.
- A sum of decimal numbers for goals like miles/kilometers walked.
- A sum of the cells in the column that have text in them for tracking goals like affirmations or whether or not you drank alcohol.
All of these columns can be duplicated or deleted to fit your needs.
At the bottom of the sheet, you’ll see the running totals and at the end of the year, you can see how well you did. Here’s an example with the goals and columns completed.
The second sheet is a monthly tracking sheet that looks like this:
In this tracker, you can track two goals for each of your pillar goals. For example, your pillar goals could be being healthier and wealthier. The sub-goals could be doing yoga and not drinking alcohol for the first and tracking money earned and if you had home-cooked meals every day for the second.
You can then add the details from your monthly retrospective to the tracker and see how well you’re doing with the sum at the end.
Mistakes to Avoid When Creating a Daily Routine
You’re inspired by the likes of Andrew Huberman and Brian Johnson and you want to kick off your new daily routine with a fully-fledged plan like theirs. We get it.
The problem is, if you’re new to tracking your daily routine, you’re probably going to overwhelm yourself and it’s just not going to stick.
Here are some mistakes to avoid to help keep you on the right path:
- Adding too much at once: Diving right into a new routine with a hundred different goals to work toward is difficult to stick to, and if you find yourself slipping in one area, you’re more likely to give up entirely. Start small and build up.
- Setting unrealistic expectations: It’s unlikely you’ll be running a marathon in six months if you only took up running last week. Make sure your goals are realistic and achievable — like running your first 5k.
- Making it too easy: While you don’t want to make things too difficult, you also don’t want to make them too easy. If you’re setting yourself a goal for the year that you know you can achieve by the end of February, you’re probably not going to push yourself any further. Challenge yourself while keeping it realistic.
- Thinking on the small scale: Setting yourself a daily goal works for some people but it’s not always feasible. It only gives you two options: either you hit it, or you don’t. Instead, set yourself a goal for the week or the month, like doing 300 minutes of yoga for the month instead of 10 minutes per day. This way, you can still make up the goal even if you miss a few days, and you’re much less likely to become discouraged.
- Using the wrong kind of tool: If you’re not on your phone much, it doesn’t make sense to use a mobile app to track your goals. Instead, opt for the tool that suits you, whether it’s an Excel spreadsheet, a printable weekly schedule template, a whiteboard, an app, or a journal.
The Bottom Line
Tracking your daily routine is the first step in helping yourself achieve your goals.
Whether you’re just starting out in tracking your goals and daily routine, or you’re a seasoned professional looking for a better method, our daily routine template is a beneficial tool to help keep you on track.
Download the spreadsheet template today or grab the Notion version and missing your goals will become a thing of the past.
FAQs
The first step is to decide your SMART goals for what you want to achieve, then figure out what routines and habits will help you achieve them. Essentially, you need to work backward:
- Define the goal, such as losing 10lb in three months.
- Work out how you will achieve the goal, such as eating less and moving more.
- Break it down into a daily goal, like maintaining a 300-calorie deficit and walking 6,000+ steps every day.
- Track the daily goal.
Remember there is no one-size-fits-all approach and keep tweaking your routine until you find what works for you.
There aren’t any hard-and-fast rules to creating a daily routine template, so there isn’t any one thing that should absolutely be in your routine — it will entirely depend on you and your goals.
That being said, try to incorporate habits and daily tasks that help you move closer to your goals, as opposed to frivolous ones.
Sticking to a new routine can be difficult, especially for neurodivergent people who tend to struggle with forming habits.
The biggest thing to remember is consistency is key.
The second most important thing is not to get discouraged if (and when) you fail. Pick yourself up and carry on.
It may take you a few weeks for the routine to start feeling like a regular part of your life, but it could take a few months or even a year or more for it to truly stick. Use tools like the daily routine template or habit tracker apps to help you.
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