Stop Doing Things Manually - Automate Your Daily Agenda

All successful people have a routine: wake up early, go to the gym, meditate, work, eat well, relax, reflect, do it again, or some variation. Most successful people have a to-do list, and most people want to reflect each night. 

People who haven’t embraced technology are still doing this on a notepad (be better than the yellow sticky note pad) and have no real way of staying accountable or tracking their progress. If this is you, use technology to help analyze your progress and save yourself time - at the end of the day, time is our most precious asset. 

Let’s tackle the nightly reflection and how to improve your process. Utilizing a solution like Assembly, you can automate your process and send daily reminders when you want to be reminded. 

You can create an account here. Once you sign up for Assembly, you can press the big create button at the top left of the page. Once you do that, you will want to create a flow, “i.e., a workflow.” You can look through the template library and select the daily reflection template. Once you select the template, you will have a few choices to build your daily reflection workflow to fit your specific use case. 

1. If you want to reflect daily Monday-Friday or every day of the week, you would set the first setting to be “scheduled date a time” and then select the day you want the email reminders to start as well as select the recurrence of the workflow to be daily M-F or daily. 
2. You can select the time when you want the reminder to go to you daily (ideally after the work day is over)
3. Once you select the reminder schedule, you can edit the questions. If you don’t like the pre-selected questions you want to answer each night, simply adjust it. Delete questions you don’t like, change the wording on current questions, add new questions (open-ended, dropdown questions, sliding scale questions, and more), and make this workflow fit your need. 
4. Should you want to understand how you feel day to day, create a sliding scale question and ask yourself daily how you feel 1-10. 
5. Track the changes over time, see if you are happier or sadder, and perhaps ask yourself why in this questionnaire. 
6. Analytics come standard in each workflow and should be able to tell you your trendlines and how progress is going quickly. To find analytics, go to the daily reflection feed and look at the insights tab on the page. 
   

For your to-do list, stop using sticky notes; it’s hard to stay accountable, sticky notes can’t send you reminders, and you’re wasting paper. Using Assembly’s Notebook, you can create tasks, assign them to yourself and change the date of when you want to accomplish them. You can easily hold yourself accountable; there is a digital history of everything you accomplished (so if you ever want to go back in time, you don’t have to dig through the trash to find that sticky note, you can look through your completed tasks). 

Why would you not do that if you could save yourself 20 -30 minutes a day by automating things you were doing manually? Changing habits is hard, but some say progress is happiness. Take those 30 minutes back in your day and send @join_assembly a shoutout on Instagram or @joinassembly on LinkedIn about what you did with your newfound time.