How and Why to Establish a Daily Routine

A daily routine can be the key to success in anything. It’s a necessary part of life that helps keep you focused, organized and productive day after day. If you feel like your days are chaotic and unstructured, it might help if you establish one structure for yourself.

“Daily routines” are a way to establish order, and they can also help with your mental health. I have created some examples of daily routines that you may want to try out. Read more in detail here: daily routine examples.

Winston Churchill looked forward to being free of “discipline and authority, and set up in absolute freedom in England with nobody to give me commands or wake me by bell or trumpet” when he left the military at the age of 26 to pursue a literary career and a seat in Parliament.

Despite the fact that his daily life was no longer regulated by a schoolmaster or a senior commander, he did not abandon the practice of maintaining a daily timetable. Instead, he devised a regimen that he enjoyed since he had devised it himself.

A visitor to Chartwell, his rural residence in England, may have been excused for missing or misinterpreting this routine. Despite the fact that his daily routine was unorthodox, it was also highly tight. “He was incredibly ordered, almost like a clock,” one of the scholars who supported Winston in drafting his books remembered. His routine was completely autocratic. Every day, he established himself a strict schedule and would get irritated, if not angry, if it was not followed.”

Let’s look at a day in the life of Winston Churchill, and then talk about how developing your own daily routine might help you thrive as an adult.

The Daily Routine of Winston Churchill

Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are from William Manchester’s The Last Lion.

At 8 a.m., Churchill takes off his black sleeping mask and rips the blankets off his nude body. He constantly sleeps naked and, feeling that being naked is perfectly normal, wanders about the home naked as well. In public and while staying at another’s house, he usually wears a robe (“in respect” to his hosts’ “ideas of appropriateness,” he explains), yet the sight of the pallid, rotund politician sometimes shocks one of his staff – or a fellow head of state. While boarding with FDR for one of their wartime meetings, the president went over to Churchill’s room to convey an idea, only to discover the prime minister naked and about to take a bath. “Churchill subsequently informed King George that he was the first British prime minister in history to welcome a head of state nude,” writes the author with a sly grin.

Winston “moves into the bathroom with an alacrity startling given his age and weight and rapidly shaves himself with a safety razor while his valet draws the first of his two daily baths while his valet draws the second of his two daily baths.” “Reciting Kipling, practicing speeches or lectures he would soon give, or singing, not in the virile baritone common in Parliament, but in a gentle, high tone,” Churchill says as he soaks in the warm water. He changes into a blue velvet dressing gown or a green and gold silk robe with a dragon printed on the front after his bath.

The Old Man gets back into bed, freshly bathed and dressed. For the next two hours, Churchill sits propped up on cushions and reads through a stack of newspapers. If he comes upon anything especially intriguing, he will take it to his wife Clementine’s chamber to show her. She’s also reading the newspaper, and she’ll be visiting with her spouse to discuss some interesting news.

Churchill smokes on a cigar and drinks “a weak scotch and soda,” which will be “refreshed with soda throughout the morning,” while he reads. This is merely his first drink of the day; he’ll have champagne, a couple of brandies, and a port or beer for lunch; more champagne and brandy for dinner; and another watered-down whiskey to end the evening. His alcohol intake is excessive, and his detractors and critics are quick to label him an alcoholic. But he isn’t one of them. He seldom allows his drinking to influence his conduct or interfere with his daily activities. While Churchill’s “consumption of alcohol… persisted at rather regular intervals during most of his waking hours,” his tolerance for it was “Olympian,” and his drinking had no “visible impact on his health or mental processes,” according to Robert E. Sherwood, FDR’s speechwriter and biographer. Anyone who claims he got muddled by alcohol has clearly never had to argue with him late at night about some factual issue.” Churchill’s physicians advise him to drink more sensibly, but he refuses, claiming, “I have taken more from alcohol than it has taken from me.”

After reading all of the newspapers, it’s time to respond to the massive quantity of mail that Churchill gets every day. As Churchill dictates (his favored form of “writing”) letters to private persons and government officials, a secretary sits by. After you’ve done with the mail, you may start dictating notes and greeting any guests that have come to Chartwell. Visitors are often amused by the image that greets them; Vice Admiral Sir Douglas Brownrigg described it as “a most extraordinary spectacle, perched up in a huge bed, with the whole of the counterpane littered with dispatch boxes, red and all colors, and a stenographer sitting at the foot — Mr. Churchill himself with an enormous Corona in his mouth.”

The next chore for Churchill is to go through galley proofs for the newest book he’s working on and ask his main researcher to double-check and verify critical aspects. He usually starts working on his speeches at this stage. He walks the room, blurting forth phrases at a rate that his secretaries can’t keep up with. “Dashing about in shorts and undershirt and a bright red cummerbund as I ran after him from room to room with a paper and pencil fighting to keep pace with the torrential flood of words,” one of them remembers Churchill doing. As the wordsmith heats up and gets his stride, the flow of skillful oratory accelerates; “By midday, the cadences of his writing have started to trot; by 1:00 P.M., they are galloping.”

Churchill puts his work aside and gets dressed to the nines for lunch at 1:15 p.m. (hence the aforementioned cummerbund). Churchill adores excellent food and good company, therefore he values his mealtimes and enjoys preparing them in a leisurely, formal manner. For both lunch and supper, he is typically joined by a number of visits and distinguished guests. Churchill usually dominates the discussion, but his guests don’t mind since he’s so intriguing.

Churchill dons his Stetson hat and proceeds to his property’s goldfish pond to feed the ducks and swans that swarm nearby after the midday meal is over. “Arf! Arf!” and “Yoick!” he yells to the birds as he gets closer. As a result, a ritual that is “an fundamental aspect of the Churchillian day” begins:

“He settles into the wicker chair, dismisses his servant, and sits for at least a half hour, alone and immovable.” Another weak Johnny Walker and Coke, a carton of cigars, a pagoda-shaped ashtray, and a jar of long Canadian matches, handy in a rising wind, are on a table behind the chair. Here, the squire of Chartwell wants to be alone. Long afterward, servants will remember him reciting Housman and Kipling to himself, or reading, or simply staring out across the Weald, alone with his thoughts, a great hunched figure whose cigar smoke mingles with the many scents of an English country home, including, in season, the scent of freshly cut grass.”

Churchill returns inside after his time of meditation by the pond to paint, read, or listen to music. He then changes into a silk sleeping vest and goes back into bed for a snooze at 3 a.m. After being exposed to it while working as a war journalist in Cuba, Churchill developed the practice of taking an afternoon nap. He has swore by its advantages ever since:

“Much more than a lengthy night, relaxation and a stint of sleep in the midst of the day renew the human body.” Nature did not create us to work or even play from eight o’clock in the morning till midnight. We put a load on our system that is both unjust and inefficient. We should divide our days and marches in half for every reason, whether business or pleasure, mental or physical.”

Churchill feels that taking a sleep in the afternoon helps him be more productive. He’s discovered that he can only write well for a few hours at a time before his brain tires out and the quality suffers. So he may have two creative working times each day – one in the morning and one late at night – while still having time for socialization and duck feeding – by breaking up his routine with a sleep. During the war years, when lounging by the pond is no longer a luxury, Churchill will discover that taking a regular sleep permits him to work 16-17-hour days. Even at his elderly age, with the weight of the battle on his shoulders, he will be able to sustain the energy of an indomitable steam engine if he receives a total of 8 hours of sleep every day – it does not have to be in a single stretch.

Churchill gets up about 5:00 p.m. after a two-hour nap and plays card games with his family. It’s time for the second of the day’s baths at 7:00 p.m. He mulls over potential language for some upcoming talks while he rests in the pool.

It’s time to change and settle down for supper at 8:30 p.m. The table is once again crowded with relatives, guests, and friends. Following the lunch, the gentlemen go to the drawing room for cigars, cognac, and discussions on politics and current events. “He’ll speak about his school days, the important political problems of the past, the MPs who battled over them, battlefields of his boyhood, [and] strategic innovations in the American Civil War until 10:00 p.m., or later.”

Churchill starts his second working shift of the day after the guests have gone home or retired to their lodgings to remain the night. Churchill is ready to depart despite the fact that it is 11:00 p.m. and most of his fellow Englishmen are asleep. He changes into a more comfortable outfit and invites his aides to join him in the library:

“Entering the room in his crimson, green, and gold dressing robe, the cords trailing behind him, his entrance preceded by the harff, harff of his slippers.” He must read the text he dictated the night before and then review the newest galleys, which came a few hours ago from London, before welcoming his researcher and the two secretaries on duty tonight. Churchill’s printers’ bills are stunning since his squiggled red modifications surpass the copy set—the proofs seem as though many spiders smeared in crimson ink crawled over the pages. His exceptional fluency, though, compensates for the cost. He’ll have dictated anywhere between 4,000 and 5,000 words by the end of the night. On weekends, he could write more than 10 thousand words.”

Churchill’s night normally finishes at 2 a.m., but if he has more work to do, he may stay up until 3 or 4 a.m. Then, at 8 a.m., he’s awake and ready to gallop through another wonderfully Churchillian day.

Lesson #2 Key Takeaways

Our lives are carefully regimented by our parents and schools while we’re youngsters, and we look forward to the day when we can do anything we want with our days.

When we initially move out and have this liberty, the independence might be a bit overwhelming at first; we abandon any semblance of a schedule…to our eventual cost. I remember having no routine as a freshman in college. I got up whenever I felt like it (and regularly overslept my early courses), studied whenever I felt like it (not often), and played video games into the wee hours of the morning. What is the unavoidable result? I was on the verge of failing the class.

This is a regular occurrence. By the time we graduate, most of us, including me, have incorporated a little more of a plan into our daily routine – though our day-to-day lives are still lived in a very haphazard manner. Then we acquire our first real job, and our experiment with having total control over our schedule seems to be over.

While most of us will never be able to plan our whole day as Churchill did, all of us, even those who work a 9-5, have two magnificent blocks of time to mold in whatever manner we want: our mornings and nights. These time slots are blank canvases that may be transformed into the richest aspects of our lives when directed by a regular routine. Unfortunately, most adults waste them instead.

Every adult contains a kid who despises restrictions and wishes to be completely free to do whatever he wants. This inner kid despises the phrase “routine,” much alone the thought of arranging his free time. When we have free time, we simply want to let everything hang out and see what we feel like doing at the time.

While having a free schedule should theoretically lead to more enjoyable, productive, and/or creative activities, it more often than not merely leads to the route of least resistance. You order takeout, play with the kids while constantly checking your phone, and then browse the internet for “just a few minutes,” which turns into two hours – and whoa, is it almost bedtime?

Instead, consider this:

You sit down at the table with your wife and kids for a homecooked lunch between 6 and 6:30 p.m. You and your family play a board game from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. Then, before tucking them in, you assist them in getting ready for bed and tell them a tale.

Now that the kids are in bed, you can devote 8-9 hours to your new hobby: woodworking. After that, you allow yourself a half-hour of just-for-fun internet browsing before reading for another half-hour. You study your scriptures and write in your diary at 10:00 a.m. After that, you take a James Bond shower to assist you sleep, and then go to bed at 11:00 p.m., ready to start your equally satisfying morning routine in 7 hours.

Why Having an Evening and Morning Routine Is Crucial to Being a Great Adult

One of the most essential paradoxical facts to learn as an adult is that certain regulations may actually be very liberating rather than restrictive. “Be regular and tidy in your life…so that you may be violent and creative in your writing,” said author Gustave Flaubert.

Routines in the morning and evening may help you be more productive and get the most out of life. You may not have complete control over your weekday, but you do have complete control over these two time windows. You may use them to ensure that the most essential tasks are completed, such as working out, spending time with friends and family, starting a side company, reading, and other hobbies. Rather of suffocating your creativity, they may help you liberate it and put it to good use. Morning and evening rituals are the first defense for adults in combating the most frequent ailment of adulthood: “I feel like life is just passing me by.” You waited your whole childhood to accomplish anything you wanted – don’t spend it watching TV or surfing the web mindlessly!

Morning and evening routines not only help you to accomplish more, but they also offer your life more rhythm, texture, and joy, as do all rituals. They play an important role in “setting the stage” – building your own rich, exciting environment around you while you script your own life. Would you want to see your life as a movie, or would you be bored to tears? Churchill made sure that each day was a narrative worth reading and a voyage worth traveling, as Manchester writes:

“A Chartwell day’s ceremonial unfolding, from sunrise to Kent’s deep blue darkness, is a sort of private spectacle for him.” He likes it; he thinks it’s as efficient as it is enjoyable, and he never doubts—nor does anybody else sleeping in this house—that he’s the only one suited to be the author, producer, director, stage manager, and, of course, the show’s hero.”

What activities should you include in your daily routines? In a later piece, we’ll go into the significance of work, leisure, and hobbies, but for now, just know that the sky’s the limit. Of course, one does not have to follow Churchill’s schedule; I could not, in good conscience, propose that one emulate his drinking habits! (Though I can’t help but agree with Manchester’s remark: “It might of course be argued that had he personified the ideal of moderation—more exercise, less alcohol, less reckless conduct, fewer cigars—he may well have lived a long and rich life for many years beyond the ninety he was allotted.”) Time for hobbies, relationships, mental development, spiritual centering, and yes, certain “indulgences” – whatever you define them – should all be part of one’s daily routine. As a teetotaler, I won’t be sipping a diluted whiskey, but others may consider doing out every day to be a “indulgence.” Nonetheless, it gives me so much joy that it has become a sacred element of my daily ritual.

You couldn’t wait to be free of routine as a youngster; as an adult, remember not to toss the baby out with the bathwater. It’s possible that a routine you establish for yourself may prove to be the key to experiencing the type of adulthood you’ve always desired as a child.

Listen to our podcast for tips on how to establish the ideal morning routine:

Complete the Series

The Winston Churchill Adult School is now open for enrollment. Lesson #1: Develop a Mighty Moral Code as a Prerequisite to Becoming the Author of Your Own Life Lesson #3: Live Romantically Lesson #4: Develop a Nostalgic Love for History Lesson #5: Keep Your Sense of Adventure Don’t Be Afraid to Start a Family (Lesson #6) Work Like a Slave; Command Like a King; Create Like a God is the seventh lesson. Winston Churchill offers advice on hustling, leadership, and hobbies. Conclusion: Thought with action equals a fantastic adulthood.

Sources:

William Manchester’s The Last Lion Trilogy

Watch This Video-

The “what is your daily routine” is a question that has been asked many times. There are many benefits to establishing a routine, including increased productivity and better health.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is it important to establish a daily routine?

A: It is important to establish a daily routine so that you are doing the same things each day. This helps with your creativity and sleep schedule. If you do not have a daily routine, it can be hard for yourself or others to keep track of whats happening in your life.

What is a routine Why is it important?

A: A routine is a set of exercises that are performed on a regular basis in order to improve and maintain fitness. They typically consist of a series of stretches, basic strength training, cardio exercise, balance work and plyometrics.