How an Ideal Ordinary Day Can Help You Follow Through on Your Best Intentions

A​​fter my last meditation retreat, I almost never followed through on my intention to meditate more at home because I had no plan for when I’d fit it into my day.

When I went to bed thinking I’d meditate before work, I nearly always changed my mind when I woke up. I’d think: I should prioritize my sleep.

Wouldn’t it be nice to take a break in the middle of the workday and meditate?

I’ll get so much done this morning if I just get to work right away, while I’m fresh.

And so, a daylong negotiation with myself began. I’d make a loose plan to meditate, but then I wouldn’t do it. So I’d make another plan, and another, until it was literally bedtime and I was too tired.

Every one of those dozen vague decisions about when I’d meditate would draw on the same attention I needed for focus, depleting my energy and dampening my mood.

And it would leave a task unfinished in my brain, triggering what psychologists call the Zeigarnik effect, where our brain reminds us, again and again, to do the thing we need to do. These unhelpful, intrusive thoughts don’t get the thing done; they just disrupt our focus and hinder performance and productivity.

However, when we make a specific plan for when we’ll complete something, the intrusive thoughts disappear, even though we haven’t done anything except decide when we’ll do it.

One way to avoid the Zeigarnik effect is to design your ideal ordinary day: plan your morning, work, exercise, and evening routines, so you decide only once when you’ll do the things you want to do. I realize “design your ideal ordinary day” sounds about as thrilling as “optimize your sock drawer,” but stay with me here; it’s kind of like making a vision board but way more tangible.

Stack, don’t calendar

We typically decide when to do something by choosing a time to do it. But the things we do habitually aren’t decided by the clock; rather, they’re determined by what comes right before them. Most of the things we want to do shouldn’t be spread across our calendar as appointments; they should be stacked onto habits we already have. There are three ways we “decide” (consciously or not) when to do something:

1. A scheduled item appears on the calendar and starts at a specific time; it often involves other people. A dentist appointment is scheduled, as are meetings and your favorite yoga class.

2. A habit lives in our nervous system and begins when an environmental prompt triggers it. I don’t decide to brush my teeth after I put on my PJs; putting on my PJs just leads to brushing my teeth. Habits are the ultimate form of ease because they let us do things without having to decide or will ourselves to do them.

3. A routine is a chain of small habits, often starting with a scheduled activity. My morning routine begins when my alarm goes off. The alarm is scheduled; if I don’t set it, the routine doesn’t happen.

As much as I want to wake up at 4:30 a.m. to meditate for an hour, that just isn’t happening for me these days. (I do believe that the more I have to do, the more I’d benefit from meditating, and still: no thanks. I need my sleep.) Once I admitted this to myself, I was able to stop trying to shoehorn it into my morning. Now, it’s a very relaxing part of my bedtime routine, anchored by a short gratitude practice and daily reflection.

Scheduled events, habits, and routines all pre-decide when we do something. With something scheduled, the clock decides. With habits, the environmental cue or prompt (which I call an anchor) decides. In a routine, the previous behavior is the anchor, so it decides.

What anchors your habit?

Habits are always triggered by what comes right before them, so the single most important decision you’ll make about any new habit is what it will follow. That’s the anchor. The structure is simple:

After I [anchor], I will [action].

An anchor has to be something that reliably happens right before you want the new behavior to occur. “After I pour my morning coffee, I will take my supplements.” “After I close my laptop for the day, I will put on my walking shoes.”

This is the engine behind habit formation, and designating a consistent anchor for a behavior gives it a consistent context that substantially increases the odds you’ll follow through. This works for desired behaviors, thoughts, and even feelings, and it’s strongest when three conditions are met:

1. Format: “after X, I will Y” works best

2. Desire: You actually want to do the thing

3. Practice: You mentally and/or verbally rehearse your “after X, then I will Y” plan

Some anchors are a time and place: “at 6:15 a.m., in the kitchen.” Others are a task juncture: the moment one thing ends and another begins. Task junctures help create a natural flow within a routine’s structure, and they make better anchors because they don’t depend on our awareness of the time. When I finish my daily reflection, I naturally settle into my meditation.

Match the anchor’s frequency to the habit’s: a daily habit needs a daily anchor. “Do a thirty-minute meditation twice a week” will never be a habit because there’s no clear anchor. But if you work from home on Tuesdays and Thursdays, you can use that: “After I walk back in the door from school drop-off on work-from-home days, I will do a thirty-minute guided meditation.”

Anchors work by attaching a new behavior to an existing structure, so the next step is to design your ideal ordinary day: the version of a regular Tuesday that would leave you feeling like you’ve done the things that really matter.

Start by listing everything you want to fit in and estimating how long it will take: sleep, meals, exercise, work blocks, hygiene, time with the people you love, a wind-down before bed. Use this Ideal Ordinary Day worksheet to put them in order, essentially deciding which actions you want to stack on top of one another.

Once you’ve mapped out your day, you’ll see why routines are so powerful: a single anchor can carry more than one behavior if you chain them in a fixed order. “After I pour my coffee, I will take my supplements. After I take my supplements, I will take a walk with the dogs.” Each behavior becomes the anchor for the next, and a single anchor, like your alarm going off or pouring your coffee, triggers the whole sequence.

Test your hypothesis

Whenever I do this exercise, I find that my ideal day requires twenty-seven hours, but it’s better to know that than to discover it by constantly failing to do the things I want to do and then feeling bad about myself. Most of us are wildly, optimistically wrong about how long things will take. Your ideal ordinary day design is a hypothesis, and the first draft will be wrong in ways you can only discover by living it. Your morning routine may take 90 minutes, not 20. Adjust your estimates as you learn.

My family teases me about all this. To them, a day planned to the minute looks like a cage. But from the inside, it isn’t rigidity; it’s freedom from decision fatigue and from the disappointment of not following through on my best intentions.

What I notice most is the quiet. The voice that used to spend all day relitigating when I’d meditate is silent. Once our days have a shape and our habits have anchors, we stop carrying the weight of a hundred small decisions into everything we do. We follow the path we laid down for ourselves, and without deciding anything, we do the thing.