Changing My Daily Routine

Hi guys, this time I’ll try to write the entire of this blog post in English. Why? Yesterday I got an accident, I smashed my head too hard to the wall and suddenly I lost my ability to understand Indonesian language, kidding, I just want to improve my writing skill. They said practice is the best way to learn, so, I’ll try to practice by using this blog of mine. Anyway, feel free to correct (and obviously make me feel embarrassed :p) if there’s grammatical error in this post.

Life is so boring lately. I spend all of my time at home, doing nothing (not literally). Being unemployed is really torturing, I’m even impressed by how I could stand those judging eyes of neighbors of mine. Actually it’s hard when you’re the only son in your family and everyone expects you to get a good job. Okay, my papa always said “Maybe it’s not the right time yet to you to get a job, you have to keep up your patience and keep praying to God”, and maybe he’s right. Somehow, in this condition, I feel so grateful that I’m still having this time to spend around with family. I’d been 6 years away from family and rarely spending time with them and I can’t deny the fact that after getting a job, I’ll be away again. So one thing I want to do is spending my last time as a their child, before I become a real adult. 

Anyway, since last week, I’ve been in my way of changing my daily routine. FYI, my daily routine was really bad when I was at college. I used to have a poor daily time management for myself.

I barely got breakfast for four years of my life in college (who would spend their time crawling for food in the morning just for the sake of “breakfast”?  okay, some of my friends did, but I would prefer getting more of sleep time than walking around to get food early in the morning). I also had unregular meal time. Usually I only ate twice a day (at random time). Even sometimes I only got to eat once a day when I was so busy with things. My eating schedule was really wrecked back then. 

Beside of bad eating schedule, I was also lack of proper sleeping hours. Being engineering student means that you’ll get a lot of assignments (and a lot things to learn at home). I hardly got myself much of sleeps at night. (Actually the assignments aren’t that much, except the final project that really is too much. I just did too much procrastinating. I was (and still) that type of person who easily says “okay, let’s do some important things first and work on those assignments later” *important things : chatting, browsing, stalking, and bunch of other actually-not-so-important things). Usually I slept for only four hours at night.

With that messed up daily routine, I realize that I should make changes. I’m still young and I don’t want to make damages at my body in early age. So I decided to re-structure my daily activities.

It starts from the time I go to bed. I used to go to bed between 2 and 3 AM, but these days I would try to get sleep at 9 PM. I can’t even believe myself for this. I feel like Sleeping Beauty to sleep at that kind of hour (okay, the word ‘beauty’ and me don’t match that well). I used to think that only Disney princess who could sleep that early (Cinderella is exception, obviously). After trying really hard to sleep and activate ‘do-not-disturb’ mode on myself, I’d wake up at 03.30, do praying things and then sleep again at 04.30. I already got 6,5 hours. My (too) ideal sleep time is 8 hours/day (actually hours/day sounds so wrong for me, time/time? Really? #EngineeringThings). So I’d continue my sleep till 6 (or a little bit more, sometimes). After waking up, I’d clean my room (sounds like elementary school student’s morning routine, doesn’t it?) then get my breakfast. 

At first, I felt that getting breakfast was really odd. I just wasn’t a morning-meal person. My mama seems confused with me lately, it’s like she never sees her son waking up early in the morning begging for foods. After breakfast, I’d do things. I do looking for a job, cooking, watching news, watching downloaded TV series and even reading old books from my bookshelf. One thing that changed from my day routine is day napping. After graduated and got away with college things (and before I tried to change myself), I always gave myself time to take a nap and I realized that’s the reason why I can’t sleep in the night. So, these days I’d keep myself busy with things and try to not to sleep at the day.

I read recent study about changing habit (you can read it here), a research said that it takes 66 days to change your habit but actually there isn’t exact time about how much you need to change it. I found an interesting quote in that post :

“At the end of the day, how long it takes to form a particular habit doesn't really matter that much. Whether it takes 50 days or 500 days, you have to put in the work either way. The only way to get to Day 500 is to start with Day 1. So forget about the number and focus on doing the work.” 

I just got through two weeks (and I wish I started these things earlier) but I already feel that something is changing in myself. I hope this change would bring the better of me. I know I still got a long way ahead of my changes. One thing I want to show you is, we know that it’s hard to change our bad habits to good ones, but why didn’t we bother to try? All we need is a start and then we should believe ourselves and keep our hardwork of changing, okay, easier said than done and I start to sound like those motivators (that even myself would never believe). 

 

Maybe that’s all for now, please expect for more of English post like this one from me. Have a good day! :)

p.s : I usually called my parents by “Mamake” and “Bapake”, but in this post you must be realized that I called them by “My papa” and “My mama”. I know it sounds weird but I got that after watching the first season of Downton Abbey. I beg your pardon. :p