You Need a Reset Day - Time to Prepare

How do you plan for a day when society as we know it no longer exists? What happens on Reset Day, and how can you prepare for the future?

Self care is important. If you feel like you need a reset day, it’s time to take one.

It’s been two months since the new year began.

How are things going for you at the moment?

There’s a strong possibility you’ll say, “Not so great.”

There’s a strong possibility your optimism, drive, and momentum at the beginning of the year have waned.

There have been setbacks. To-do lists have accumulated. You’ve fallen out of step with your nascent routines. Your disposition has deteriorated. Your spirits have sunk. Your concentration is jumbled. Goals that looked reachable only a month ago are now impossible.

You’ve gone completely off the rails.

You feel like you need a second chance. And you are correct.

You need a day of rest.

What Is a Reset Day, Exactly?

Life occurs, despite one’s best efforts to turn over a fresh leaf. It’s difficult to form new habits, but it’s much easier to break old ones. The easiest approach to cope with such drift is to be re-aligned before you go too far off course – to make little course adjustments as you progress toward your objective.

However, sometimes one poor week leads to another, and everything falls apart. You just go completely off track from the direction you wish to take. Tinkering around the margins won’t help in this situation. Your off-kilter current has too much velocity, and your calendar is just too crowded to get back into a positive attitude. You’ll need a long period of unbroken time when you can clean the decks — all of them.

The new day has arrived.

A reset day is a weekday devoted to putting your life in order that you take off from work. Yes, you’ll need a vacation day to properly execute it; but, more than half of Americans don’t use all of their vacation days each year, so you probably have one left over. It may seem to be a short-term loss, but the changes it will bring to your life will be worth it in the long run.

Why not simply conduct a reset on a Saturday or Sunday, you may be thinking? You could, but completing a reset day on the weekend, in my experience, makes it enormously less successful. On such days, you presumably have some major duties to complete, and if you have small children, you’re probably schlepping them about to various events and/or they’re interfering with your work. Your significant other has her own ideas about how she wants to spend your time. Also, on your reset day, you’ll be doing a number of tasks, some of which may entail phoning a company that is closed on weekends.

A weekday reset day offers you eight uninterrupted hours to straighten both your physical and metaphorical home — to re-calibrate everything that’s gone wrong.

You give yourself a chance to extinguish all the hot places rather than continually putting out one fire while another burns. You offer yourself a totally new start, a blank slate on which to restart your efforts; it clears your head of all the cobwebs created by incomplete to-dos, distracting diversions, and nagging questions. A reset day establishes a “temporal landmark” – a date that marks the transition from one period of time to the next – and has been proved to boost your motivation in the future.

In my personal life, I’ve discovered that I need a reset day now and again, and I’ve had wonderful success with them. I’ve included some suggestions for what you should do on your reset day below.

The Reset Day’s 8-Hour Schedule

You don’t have to devote precisely one hour to each of these processes; if one takes less time than the next, go on. But don’t spend more than an hour on any of them — you want to make sure you cover all of the “phases.” You’ll get to tie up any loose ends from the previous phases in the seventh hour.

You don’t have to stick to this schedule/order exactly; do what works best for you. However, I believe this is a useful idea of the kind of tasks you’ll want to do on a reset day.

Hour 1: Organize Your Home

Cleaning your room, according to Jordan B. Peterson, may be the first step toward putting the rest of your life in order, and making your bed, according to Naval Admiral William McRaven, can help you change the world.

It’s important to consider your surroundings. Your thoughts are chaotic and untidy when the world around you is chaotic and messy. You’ll be in a better frame of mind to get everything else straightened out after you’ve organized your current situation.

Now, you don’t want to spend your whole reset day cleaning; instead, you want to focus on larger macro activities that have a significant impact on how your home feels. Here’s a nice starting point:

Dishes should be emptied from both the sink and the dishwasher.
Clean the kitchen countertops by removing any debris and wiping them off.
Fold and store any clean but unfolded laundry.
Make a clean bed
If the trash can is full, take it out.
Vacuum any places of the home where rubbish may be seen.
Fill empty toilet paper holders with rolls of toilet paper, and keep additional rolls in the bathroom.
Sort through heaps of mail to find what you’re looking for.

See how much you can do in an hour, but after that time has passed, go on to the next phase.

Do a Brain Dump in the second hour.

Because we have so many “open loops,” we sometimes go off course with our objectives, or at least don’t give them our entire attention. These are uncompleted activities or unsolved issues that plague our brains on a daily basis. While working on a project, you begin to consider whether or not you should complete your estate planning. You’re worrying about their college fund while playing with your kids. You’re pondering your new training strategy ten minutes later.

Switching back and forth between the current work and others that have yet to be completed is psychologically exhausting. When I have too many of these open loops going on in my thoughts, I usually go off the tracks. Instead of handling all of the tasks that need to be done, my mind feels scattered and distracted, and I accomplish nothing.

Perform a brain dump to control the tyranny of open loops by writing down everything and everything that’s been weighing on your thoughts.

Consider your whole life: job, gym, family, friends, church, and so on, and the duties that need to be completed in each of them.

Also, stimulate your mind and attempt to jot down any questions – large or little – that you’ve been putting off figuring out; i.e., you keep wanting to seek up the solution, but even a google search seems like too much work, so you wind up scrolling through Instagram instead.

Some instances are as follows:

What exercise regimen should I follow?
What is the proper squat technique?
What’s the best way to get started with the keto diet?
How much would a flight to New York City cost?
What is a suitable date for our next camping vacation and where should we go?
What’s the greatest facial hairstyle for me?
What should be my next read?
How can I shave the hair on my nose?

I use my Getting Things Done Trigger List to help me think of all the open loops I have in my head when I do my mind dump. You may use pen and paper or another media to keep track of everything you dump. The todoist app is quite useful for keeping track of both professional and personal chores for me.

Hour 3: Complete as many tasks as possible.

Put a star next to each task/question that can be completed/answered in 10 minutes or less on your brain dump list. Things that just demand a single, simple, straightforward action or a little amount of investigation. Examples:

Make an appointment with your physician.
Watch a video on how to correctly squat.
A fast start guide to the keto diet may be found here.
Register for a 5k.
Make an appointment with a plumber.
Pay your bills
Make a backup of your PC
Return your online clothing order if it doesn’t fit.
Purchase a new belt.
To begin budgeting, create a Mint account.
Send a text message to the church’s activity coordinator about next month’s event.
Choose one of AoM’s 100 must-read books to read and request at the library.

Determine how many tasks you can do in one hour. After that, go to the next step.

4th Hour: Review Higher-Level Objectives

Isn’t it nice to be able to shut some of those loops? You may already feel the weight of your mind being lifted.

You’re in a lot better position to assess your higher-level objectives now that your mind is free of those pesky little doo-dads.

Use this hour to set some major macro objectives if you don’t already have any. For more inspiration, see our tutorial on how to make a life blueprint (you won’t be able to make a complete, thorough life plan in an hour, but it’s a good place to start thinking about your responsibilities in life and how you’d want to better in them).

Ask yourself the following questions when you review/create your goals:

How am I doing on this goal?
Is this a goal I still want to achieve?
What is one thing I can do today to get me closer to this goal?
What is one behavior I can start today that will help me get closer to my goal?

Hour 5: Establish (or Reinstate) a Routine

Not having a fixed daily pattern is one of the most important causes in feeling fragmented, restless, and unproductive. I wish this were not the case; I wish you could do anything you wanted, whenever you wanted, and still feel amazing. However, for the vast majority of individuals, if they don’t have a defined pattern, their lives are usually disorganized. You’re always laying your head down at night, feeling like you didn’t get the most out of the day.

Now is the time to make a daily routine for yourself if you haven’t already. It might be beneficial to plan out each hour of the day/week. However, things seldom go as planned during your working hours. So focus on the portions of the day that you have complete control over, such as your mornings and nights.

Create a morning and evening ritual to “bookend” your day: Decide when you’ll get up and when you’ll go to bed, as well as what you’ll do in the 1-2 hours between rising and hitting the hay. Make a detailed plan and write it down! More information on the importance of morning and evening routines may be found here.

If you already have a routine but it isn’t working for you, it’s possible that it no longer corresponds to your reality and the way your schedule and obligations have changed over time. Despite these changes, you continue to attempt to fit your old pattern into your new existence, which leads to dissatisfaction.

Use your reset day to adapt your routines to better meet your new schedule in this scenario. Maybe you can’t perform your ideal, super-productive morning routine any more, which included meditating, journaling, exercising, planning, and reading. It’s not a huge deal. Choose the chores that are most essential to you, remove the ones that aren’t, and establish it as your new routine. Perhaps you just exercise in the morning and plan at night. It’s preferable to have a regimen that you can keep to than one that makes you feel bad about yourself. You’re still getting critical things done, even if it’s in a simplified version.

Hour 6: Make a plan to avoid going off the rails again.

It’s okay to have a reset day every now and again, but you don’t want to make it a habit. You could have one more vacation day, but you surely don’t want to give up a week!

Make strategies to prevent straying off track again to reduce the likelihood of requiring another reset day (at least anytime soon).

Do some self-reflection. What were the primary factors that led to your derailment? Is your home always a mess? What are your web-surfing habits? Not having a defined to-do list or habit – or just not following it?

Spend some time developing an action plan to address whatever variables are at the root of the issue. If the lack of a routine or to-do list was your issue, you should have addressed it in the preceding phases. If you can’t get anything else done because you’re staring at your phone, “declutter” your digital life and download some applications that will help you break your goal-sabotaging surfing habit.

A pound of cure is worth an ounce of prevention.

7th Hour: Tighten Any Loose Ends

If you left anything vital undone in the previous rounds in order to go on to the next, here is your time to finish what you started.

Unwind/Rejuvenate (hour 8)

Treat yourself to something soothing after a long day of getting things done. It will help your mind and/or body recuperate. Take a sleep, have a massage, relax in a sauna, soak in a tub, or go hiking.

Find something that makes you happy and go for it. It will re-energize you completely. I understand how difficult it is to explain such “indulgence,” but consider it as “sharpening the saw” – a break that will help you to cut through your objectives much more efficiently once you restart your quest.

The Next Day: Get Right to Work

You’re ready to take on the world now that your physical and metaphorical houses are in order. The deck is stacked in your favor. A solid foundation has been laid. Make the most of the momentum you gained on your reset day by smashing objectives and slaying dragons. You’ve got it.

Watch This Video-

The “how to reset your life in a day” is an article that tells you how to make the most out of your day. The article includes tips about exercise, diet, and more.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does it mean to need a reset?

A: When something needs a reset, it means that there is an issue with the system and you need to reboot or restart.

How do you reset your day?

A: You cannot reset your day, but you can use the included cheat code to become invulnerable for a short period of time.

What is a life reset?

A: A life reset is a process by which you start over, going through all the levels again and getting new weapons. If you want to do this, go to Game Options in-game and change your settings there.