The First Step

Living is not easy; there is no instruction manual showing us how to live. But perhaps we can make one, and that's exactly what I'm going to do. I'm not exactly an expert—after all, I'm still young, and it's my first time living—but I can try my best to write down everything I have learned so far. The most logical place to start would be with the most important things, and I have no doubt that the most important thing in life is to be able to control it and be the master of your own journey.

Think about that for a moment: are you in control of your own life? Imagine that your life is a ship: to steer it in the direction you want to go, you must be at the helm. And if you don't steer the ship, you will be carried away by the tides of your impulses. If you're lucky enough, you won't hit an iceberg of failure, but you can't always count on luck. Regaining control is the first step to reaching your intended destination.

But before thinking about how to regain control of your life, you first need to figure out what life is. The most practical definition is that life is nothing but the sum of all your days, so what you do with the days you have will determine if you'll have a good or bad life. Contrary to what most people believe, life is not about the big achievements you get once every decade; it's about what you do in the meantime, on a daily basis.

By agreeing with this definition, we can conclude that if you want to take control of your life, you must first take control of your daily tasks and determine what you are going to do with each of the 24 hours you have every day. Therefore, the first practical step for achieving a healthier and happier life is to create a balanced routine and follow it every day.

I have an uncle who once said to me that we must divide the 24 hours of the day into 3 segments of 8: one for sleeping, one for working, and one for everything else. I believe he was right; this is the most logical way to organize our day. The only problem is that some people work more than 8 hours, and most people don't work on weekends, because our work schedule is usually organized by weeks, not days. For that reason, I made a few modifications.

Instead of doing the exact same thing every day, we must create at least two different routines: one for work days, and another one for our days off. However, we have to keep that same proportion of spending 1/3 of our time working, 1/3 sleeping, and 1/3 doing whatever we like to do in our free time. Considering that a week has 168 hours, that means we must allocate 56 hours for each category.

If you don't work for 56 hours a week, you can use the remaining hours to study or work on a personal project; the important thing is to set aside those 56 hours to be productive. An average of 8 hours of sleep per day is ideal for a healthy adult, so if you're sleeping less than 56 hours a week, you should consider sleeping more, and vice-versa.

About the other third, you shouldn't use it all to play video games or scroll on your phone. It's imperative that you exercise for at least 7 hours a week. It could be any kind of exercise, as long as you're doing it out in the sun. I recommend reading or meditating for that same amount of time, because our mind is no less important than our body, and one affects the other more than people realize.

The only thing more important than having a balanced routine is to have the discipline to follow it and stay consistent. This time I only talked about how to separate your time into those three major chunks. Of course, there are many other details to consider if you want to take control of your life, but planning your days and following your own plan is the most practical one.