Too often our self-care gets put on the back burner. We all have things that we'd like to do, but somehow we don't get around to doing them. How do we make time for everything and how do we stick to our ideal habits and routines? Hello, my loves will come back to Lavendaire. So today I'll be sharing how to make time for it all from designing your ideal day and week to creating a system to actually follow through with your self-care routines and healthy habits. Before we begin today, I'd like to thank Grammarly for sponsoring today's video. Writing is a big part of my work and writing takes time. So to save time I use Grammarly. Grammarly is an AI-powered writing tool that helps you from start to finish, from brainstorming to outlining to rewriting and more. It helps me save time from my workflow and thus gives me back time for my self-care routines. One way I like to use Grammarly is to help me expand on my video ideas and organize my thoughts. So here I just have a few notes of a new video concept that I could do, and then I'm using Grammarly to help me expand on that idea, create kind of a rough outline and Grammarly can even help me write an intro for that video concept. This is so helpful for when you're stuck in the writing process. I find that it's really hard to write from just a blank page. Sometimes you just don't know what to say, where to start. So Grammarly gives you a really good starting process and then you can go ahead and edit everything yourself and add your own flare. Another cool way to use Grammarly is to use it to summarize your emails. So if you get really long emails, you can just copy and paste that into Grammarly, ask it to summarize for you, and then you can also ask for like a TLDR where it just gives you a list of the most important points. I also really like that Grammarly can help you suggest how to reply to your emails so that it gets you started in your responses and it saves a lot of time just writing emails. Grammarly is an easy way to up you and your team's productivity at work. If you'd like to try it out, you can sign up and download Grammarly for free and for more in-depth features, you can get 20% off Grammarly Premium using the link down below. All right, let's start with our first exercise, which is the ideal day and week builder. I've been really excited to share this with you guys 'cause I've been doing this for myself and I've been testing it out the system this past month and it's been working really well. So let's start with designing your ideal day and your ideal week. Filling it up with all the self-care habits, all the healthy things that you wanna do for yourself. Step number one, list out all the activities or habits that you'd like to do on a daily or weekly basis. It could be anything, just anything good for your self-care. It could be typical things like yoga, exercise, meditating, journaling. It could also be hobbies that you enjoy, like play guitar, play pickleball, paint, literally anything that you want to incorporate into your life on a consistent basis, daily or weekly. Write it down. Make like a big list. Another way to look at it is to ask yourself, "What would the ideal best version of me be doing on a daily, weekly basis?" So you probably have a vision of like your best self, your highest self. So what does this person do consistently? Are they exercising everyday? Are they eating healthy? Write all of those things down. Step number two, separate these items into two buckets, daily and weekly. So which of these activities do you wanna do every single day and be consistent with? And which do you wanna do like on a weekly basis, whether it's once or twice a week. You can also make a third bucket for monthly if there's something that you wanna do maybe once a month or so, something that brings you joy, but it's not something that needs to be part of your daily, weekly. But today's system focuses on daily and weekly. Step number three, look at your daily list and denote how much time ideally you wanna be spending on each of these activities. So if you put exercise, do you wanna exercise for an hour? Like how much time does each activity take? Meditation, does that take five minutes? Does it take 30 minutes? For every item, write down the ideal amount of time that you'd like to spend on this activity. Step number four, and this is the fun and funny part, is to start to build your day fitting in all of these activities that you said you wanted to do and then build your day adding in like the necessities, like how much time you have to spend working and even your morning routine, like brushing your teeth, having breakfast. How much time do you allot to every single thing that would go in your day? How much time for breakfast, lunch, dinner, how much time to shower, literally build it out and then add in your activities and include the time. It could be an estimate, right? Include the time for every single activity without regard for like 24 hours in a day. This part is funny because when I was first doing this exercise for myself, I put in all the time I wanted for my ideal morning routine, evening routine, how much time I wanna spend to work. And what's funny is it came out to like more than 24 hours, I think it was like 26 or 27 hours. And I was like, okay, clearly it's impossible, right? I have to cut somewhere. So that leads us to step number five is to add up all the time that your ideal day adds up to whether it's less or more than 24 hours. If it's less than 24 hours, great, you have enough time to do everything you want in your day, great. And if it's more than 24 hours, then that's where you have to start cutting and being realistic. Maybe instead of showering for 30 minutes, you shower for 15 minutes or like instead of an hour and a half for exercising, you make it an hour. I know this is just the reality of life is we have 24 hours in a day and we have to cut things and make sure it fits and to make sure we're not like jam packing our days and being nonstop. There has to be cushion for everything in between or just cushion for like taking a little longer to do things. Hopefully you left some cushion and free time with your schedule because now we're gonna move on to step number six, which is incorporating those weekly activities that you said you wanted to do. So obviously you're not doing these things every day, but you have to make time for them in your day, 'cause you're gonna be doing them once or twice a week or so. So in my day, I'll give you an example. I gave myself like a section of free time in the evening. So after dinner I have like three hours of free time where it could either be used for watching TV, playing or it could be used for things like reading, learning a language, playing piano. And those are things that I don't have to do every single day. I could do it like once a week and feel good about it. Have some space in your schedule where you can like insert those weekly activities maybe on a rotating basis. Maybe you have a schedule for like Mondays, Wednesdays, I play pickleball. Tuesdays, Thursdays I do yoga. Or you know, like find space in your schedule to alternate those weekly activities. I really hope you made time for space and free time in your schedule because you need it. We all need it. And finally, step number seven, this is where you begin to implement and test. So start today or start tomorrow. Start as soon as you can to implement this new routine and this new system. And then you can start to get some feedback. Is this working? Is this not working? Maybe I need to give more time to this and maybe I can cut time from that. Maybe I need to give myself like a 30 minute cushion between some activities, test it out and see what works for you and actually build a daily and weekly routine that works. A bonus tip on top of that is to star maybe the two or three activities that are your non-negotiables. 'cause I know when we have this like big routine with like 20 things to do, obviously it's not gonna be realistic to do it every single day. Things will pop up, surprises, detours, you know, in your daily life. And so you want to know for yourself which of these things are truly important, truly non-negotiable, and which are just like nice to have. Like if I do all these 10 things in my self-care routine, I'm happy, but I really only needed these two like to feel good about myself. So for me, I picked two that I highlight. And so my two this month were meditating and exercising. So it was important for me to like move my body every day and meditate every day. Those are the non-negotiables. Everything else on my list was like a plus, a nice to have. Like if I did it, great, if I didn't, it's fine. And that's where you have some flexibility with your life so you're not like so rigid. All right, moving on to the system. So this is the system that I created for myself to actually follow through with my self-care routines. And this has been working really well for me. I've been using it this entire month and it is a new system that I created for myself and it's working so much better than what I had in the past. So in the past, I used to track self-care alongside my work. So I made a previous video on my weekly layout where I have like Monday through Friday and one spot for the weekend. And I track like most important tasks, self-care, and then other tasks that I have to do. And after doing this ideal routine exercise, I realized I have so many ideal self-care activities. And then I also have things that I wanna switch out constantly. So it's actually better to have like a self-care template, like literally morning, evening routine, and then copy that template for every single day so that every day I don't have to write it from scratch. I just literally have that template there and I check off whatever I do that day. So I literally started a new page just for tracking my self-care to dos. So now I separate work to dos and then self-care to-dos literally on its own system. And it looks like this template on notion, I'll have the link down below if you wanna download this template. But basically I like to separate my self-care routines into morning and evening. And in the middle I'm working, so I have other systems for that. So on notion, you would create templates for your ideal routines, whether it's morning, evening routines or however you organize it throughout your day. And self-care only, right? So everything we worked on today, you would write it in a list, create a template, and then you would put it onto this notion page. And in notion you can like create a template within a calendar, which is what I did. So there's a calendar and for each day you just load your template on there and then you just check off whatever you do. So I like to separate my templates into weekday and weekend because there are other things that I like to do on the weekend to have fun. So I put things like hang out with friends, go on a adventure or work on music, things that are fulfilling to my soul. But you know, I really do those things Friday through Sunday and during the week I'm focusing on work. So that's why I like to have two different templates. One for a weekday, which is daily self-care, and then one for a weekend, which kind of includes those fun, nice to have like extra activities that I also wanna track for living my most fulfilling and thriving life. I also have a space where I can rate how I felt about that day from one to five, how well did I do towards my self-care routines? How well did I take care of myself? So I think it's nice to have kind of a rating system and then you can note like which days you're doing better and kind of it's some extra data to work with. And then at the top of this notion page, I just have a list to remind me what I need to feel my best and to thrive in life. And this is essentially what we wrote in step one. Like all the things that you wanna do in your ideal life. And then I categorized it because I noticed that they fit into categories. For example, like some of my activities are related to having amazing health and vitality, and some are related to emotional and mental wellbeing. Some are related to community, joy or a positive environment, right? I listed all these things that I feel I need to live my best life. And I put it there just to remind me of the why. Why am I tracking my self-care? Why am I doing all these things? It's important to remind yourself why you're doing it so that you stay motivated. All right, that's it for today's exercise. I hope you liked it, comment down below with your two non-negotiable activities, whether it's like a healthy habit or something related to self-care. Comment down below. I'd love to know what they are. And remember, I have the link down below if you wanna download the template. Sending you so much love, and I'll see you in the next one. Bye. (gentle music) (gentle music continues)
