Some people love to have a solid everyday routine, while others don’t mind shrugging off responsibilities and tasks. However, maintaining a consistent schedule is what separates the successful few from the mediocre many. From helping you get good grades in university to supporting an accomplished career, routine can be a powerful tool.

Keep reading to find out more about how your routine impacts your success and how you might develop a few healthier habits to support your personal and professional growth.

1. Minimises Stress

Often, life’s biggest stressors come from things you can’t control. However, many people also experience stress due to something they can control but choose not to.

Luckily, having a routine can help you take charge of your life again and minimise the anxiety that comes with unpredictability. Then, you can focus on what you have to do each day rather than worry about what needs to be done.

When you’re in university, this routine might include waking up at the same time each day and completing a nightly self-care checklist. These two habits alone can help you get more done during the day. In the same way, working professionals can improve efficiency and minimise stress by embracing a daily routine.

2. Promotes Organisation

Organisation is key to success both before and after you graduate from university. Having a routine can help you cultivate this essential skill.

Maintain structure by organising your day into 30-minute or one-hour time increments. You can also follow a set of systematic practices — like working out and eating at the same times each day — to improve your organisational skills.

Also, utilise productivity tools like mobile calendars and reminders to schedule, plan, delegate, and implement tasks and enjoy a more successful week.

3. Improves Focus and Productivity

Understanding how routines improve productivity and focus might also convince you to adopt a set schedule. After multiple studies and experiments, researchers have discovered that decision-making takes a decent amount of energy and may even cause humans to make the wrong decisions when presented with too many options.

Therefore, it’s best to keep things simple by developing a consistent routine. Rather than having to decide how to live and spend your time, you can use routine to skip the decision-making process. Then, you can simply focus on the task at hand and spend your day making the most of the time that you have.

4. Encourages Healthy Habits

Figuring out how to create a better routine will automatically encourage you to develop healthier habits, too. As you complete the same series of actions day in and day out, your body and brain will come to expect the same actions. Eventually, the predictability will help you establish positive patterns so you aren’t tempted to engage in negative ones.

Speaking of bad habits, routines can quickly help you identify and, more importantly, eliminate them. Once you resolve to follow your routine, you may realise how much time you wasted in the past. Now, you must repeatedly refuse to engage in old habits, so nothing comes between you and your success as a student and professional.

5. Facilitates a Work-Life Balance

You may not fully realise you need a routine to be successful until you achieve a healthy work-life balance. This elusive equilibrium state is difficult — if not impossible — to reach unless you maintain a routine. Yet, it’s one of the most important parts of living a healthy life as a student and working adult.

Thanks to regular habits and self-discipline, a routine will clearly show you when things start to get out of hand. Moreover, it will help you find joy in your work and free time, which can help you beat or completely sidestep burnout.

Routine | Try and Try Again

Establishing a routine takes time and patience, especially if you have been flying by the seat of your pants for a while. Adding too many good habits at once can even result in a behavior relapse, rendering your efforts unsuccessful.

Therefore, it’s important to start small and show yourself grace. Try. Then, try again. Eventually, you’ll reap the fruits of your labor and wonder how you ever survived without a routine.