Today I want to write about how I organise my day. What my days look like at the moment? If I can manage multiple projects at the same time while maintaining a healthy lifestyle, I thought it could be interesting to share it with you so you can learn from it, eventually copy it or adapt it to your own daily schedules.

My days are far from being perfect but it’s an opportunity to picture today in order to improve tomorrow.

Starting early:

6:05 am, my alarm rings and I slowly wake up. I am not used to waking up this much early yet. I recently changed it to this time and my body isn’t fully recognizing this time as my waking up hour.

I am an early riser, if that’s really a thing… I like to wake up early. Normally I’d wake up at around 6:30am in order to get started before everyone else and be fresh and ready when it’s time to sit at my desk.

I recently changed from 6:30 to 6:05 am because I wanted to have more time for my daily morning routines before to start my “work” at 8:15am.

So, when I wake up, open my room door and pet my cat who is waiting for me. She has no issue waking up but she does need her own time to adjust to my schedule everytime I change. I pet her, feed her and make sure she has clean water to drink.

Then, I open my curtains and let the light comes in. In Vietnam, from 5:45 am you can see the sunrise and it’s all year long the same schedule! So it’s daylight already and I like to smell the fresh, humid air of the morning. I live in a quiet and residential area in Saigon, where there are larger streets and a lot of trees.

Next, I go wash my face and prepare some hot drink. We have a lot of different variety of tea but my favorite is “tần lá dày” which is a medicinal plant that is good for the throat and perfectly suited against a potential covid-19 attack. But I drink it mostly because at night, the AC usually dries my throat and my nose. So the minty smell of this plant combined with the heat of this drink is perfect to start my day.

While this drink is infusing, I take 15 minutes to meditate. It’s a habit I have now for almost a year. It has become an essential part of my mornings. Even if, I admit, I don’t meditate everyday religiously. But taking 15 minutes of your day to listen to your body and acknowledge all your negative thinking, worries, body pain and learn to let thoughts come and go has helped me a lot. Before meditating I’m usually tempted to scroll down on social medias, start my day, write some todos and start thinking of remembering things. Meanwhile, after meditating, all these worries have disapeared and I feel great to be awake, I feel more energetic, more centered. And I usually realise that I know what I have to do, because I’ve planned it the day before (I’ll get more in details to that point later).

Side note on meditation: I used to think it was just “listening to your breath” and always really sceptical about its benefits. But meditation is more than that. When you meditate you purposefully send a message to your body and mind. You show them that you pay attention to them and you give them a moment to realign and calm down. I’m using Headspace app, where everyday you can find a different meditation. I’ve followed some of their programs and trainings so I could learn to meditate. Their membership is at about 56$ per year, but you can also try it for free for a few weeks I think and they have a whole section on Netflix too.

You can read an article I wrote as I was just getting started with meditation.

Writing

After meditating, I drink my infusion and I open my laptop. That’s when I take 1 hour to write down articles everyday. At the moment I am struggly to maintain this routine. Since I started, two weeks ago, I’ve had my website hacked and started a new full time mission. Two new things to handle at the same time plus some unforseen events! (check the article to see how I deal with it). But, I can be proud of myself as I’m gently picking myself up and every morning sitting at my kitchen table to write down at least a few lines about my day and about what I want to write on this blog, etc.

My goal is to write one article a day within 1 hour. This mean: write, create the featured image, post the article on my blog. I’ve already automated the creation of the featured image and the posting. So I can focus on writing.

In these articles, I want to answer questions I ask myself and publish them. Questions about being 29 year-old, French-Vietnamese, recently married, entrepreneur, foodlover, podcast producer, business consultant, community manager, etc. The idea is to see where this leads me.

Worst case scenario? I’ve at least written down answers to my questions. And I will be able to look back into them years later.

So, after one hour of writing, I’m hungry!

It’s 7:30 something and it’s time for breakfast!

Side note: at the moment, Vietnam is still under strick lockdown so swimming pool are closed and we are strickly forbidden to go out. But usually at this hour of the day I would go for a walk or to swim if I could. I’m actually thinking that if I’d not be in lockdown I’d still be going to swim-run-walk in the morning and maybe not start this writing daily habit…

Anyway, for breakfast I like varied things, between western breakfast to asian ones. I usually have it prepared the day before and I try to reserve 30 minutes to it so it’s not too long. One very important thing, I make sure I eat some fruits.

After this, I go to prepare myself for work and it’s the end of my morning routine.

Key Take aways

What I like about this morning routine is that it split my morning into two parts: first part is about me; meditation, writing, breakfast / sport. Second part is work that I’m going to talk about tomorrow.

I’m working on improving this morning routine everyday. It’s not perfect yet and the more I study, the more I find things to improve. The most important is to start by giving yourself some time in the morning to tune in with yourself. Usually mornings are the best time for this because the rest of the day is so busy, so distracting.

In future articles, I want to talk about why it’s important to take time in the morning to wake up and do activities that are only reserved for you. I also want to write more about meditation, breakfasts and more about mornings.

If you have some questions already, please use the contact form from the contact page or message me on social media and if you found this article inspiring and you want to help me share my message, please reshare this article with your friends.

If you have some comments or recommendations, I’m all ears of course! Happy to connect!

Thank you for reading until the end!

Every morning, after my meditation 🧘🏽and my breakfast ☕️, I sit at my desk for one hour and write answers to my own questions, as an entrepreneur ✍️. Then I publish it on this blog, hoping to help other entrepreneurs to find answers to their questions too. And this, no matter your “level”.

To participate, ask me questions on social medias @nicolasthanhg (click on the icons below). I may answer directly or write an article about it.

Now, you can also go back to the blog page and search for articles related to your scope of interest. 🔍

Have a good day,
Nicolas Thành