1: “It takes Americans, on average, 24 minutes to actually get out of bed and start the day—after two alarms and hitting snooze twice,” Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy write in The Gap and The Gain: The High Achiever’s Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success.
Why is this?
“If we don’t know what we’re going to do in a given situation, we will default to the most easy and obvious behavior,” they write.
The answer? An evening routine.
“What we’re about to learn is the simplest and most powerful evening routine ever,” the authors write.
“Our days will be far better spent. We’ll sleep better. Our results will speak for themselves. Our lives will change.”
2: We begin by putting our phone on airplane mode between 30 and 60 minutes before bedtime.
Then, we take out our journal. We write down our three wins from the day.
Dan Sullivan is the creator of the Strategic Coach, the world’s most successful coaching program for entrepreneurs. For decades, he has taught his entrepreneur clients to write down three “wins” at the end of each day.
Why? Because feeling like we are making progress is essential to our growth and happiness, Stanford behavior scientist Dr. BJ Fogg explains in his book Tiny Habits.
The research shows that when we write down three things we are grateful for each day, we become happier. Other studies show that being thankful before bed makes us feel better and sleep better.
“Writing three wins from the day not only boosts our gratitude but simultaneously boosts our confidence,” Dan and Ben write.
3: Finally, after writing down our three wins, we write down the three wins we want to achieve the following day.
“No more than three,” they write. “Far too many people have 10+ items on their daily to-do list, which is more a sign of being busy than being productive.”
As leadership and business expert Jim Collins said, “If we have more than three priorities, we don’t have any.”
Dan has followed this routine for fifteen years personally, and it has transformed his life.
“I would go to bed feeling . . . excited about the next day. I would wake up the next morning excited. Then, that day, I’d go out and try to have those three wins. But oftentimes, what would happen is I’d have wins that were bigger than the three I had imagined the night before.”
Because of this practice, Dan has a sense that he is always winning.
“Regardless of whether there are any setbacks or there’s any disappointments, or there’s obstacles that I’ve run into during the day, it doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, I have my three wins. Tomorrow I’m going to have three wins. In a week, I’m going to have 21 wins.”
Writing down the three things we will accomplish tomorrow gives our day a goal. It allows us to be proactive. To live our lives with purpose.
The alternative? “
“When our alarm goes off in the morning, we’ll probably either get sucked back into our phone or just hit the snooze button and fall back asleep.”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: How do I spend the last hour of my day before I go to sleep? How and why might I transform this time?
Action: Experiment today with writing down my three wins today and the three wins I want to achieve the following day.