The Investor Diary Entry #28: April 12, 2023
On a social level people are still arguing around the question of what is the importance of a daily routine. In this article we are going to further discuss this topic with concentration on the life of an investor and how does routine affect an investor’s life and success.
Most articles that discuss the daily routine, concentrate on the general daily routine of a person. In this article we are going to show two routine levels that we need to maintain.
Daily Routine Levels
As we have mentioned in the introduction to this article that we are going to discuss two levels of daily routine. The first level of daily routine is the general daily routine that everybody is talking about, and mostly everybody agrees on the importance of having a daily routine.
The second level of daily routine is the routine of a particular daily routine item. For example, in a daily routine there is an item of one hour of exercise. For that one hour of exercising to be fruitful and not a waste of time, or even harmful, one needs to have a set routine to follow.
Each item in your general daily routine needs to have its own routine. A routine is the way a person sets certain steps to reach the best possible outcome. To find the best way to organize those steps in a way that would bring the best outcome possible needs high level of repetition and analysis.
Once the steps are organized; meaning, once a routine has been found, then comes the stage of establishing the routine and being disciplined on following the routine.
Once this second level routine has been found and established, then a person by repeating this routine will gain experience in this general daily routine item. Whether this item is cooking your meal, exercising, or working.
The Relationship Between Routine And Experience
Without having a routine, one’s experience is not thorough. As we have established that during daily routine there are two levels, the same goes with experience. There are two ways for gaining experience with the existence of routine in one’s life.
The first way to gain experience with routine, is when one is trying to find the best routine that suits the person. Trying different steps, and different ways to organizing those steps to come up with the most suitable routine that motivates you and gets you the best results possible.
By this trial and error method, the level of experience one gets is enormous. First of all one’s gets know him/herself more, gets to know the routine item and its different angles, gets to finally say; “been there, done that,” and knows the outcome of each set of steps that don’t work. Those are only the main three benefits of the first way of gaining experience while establishing a second level routine.
The second way of gaining experience is when you finally find the steps and the organization and priority of those steps. Once one finds the best routine that suits him/her and gets the best outcome possible, applying this routine on daily basis gets you become increasingly proficient at what you are doing.
The more you apply the routine, the more you gain knowledge and skill about you are doing. The more you gain such experience the more you are able to analyze the routine itself and see if there is a better way of doing it, and then move back to the first step of organizing the steps and repeat.
This process gets you to the success path that you are looking for in anything that you are set out to accomplish.
The Investor’s Routine
According to the above suggested methodology, an investor’s routine is based on two levels. The investor’s general daily routine, and the investor’s investing routine.
Therefore, an investor needs first to decide how the day looks like and what are the general daily items, in terms of waking up, having meals, doing exercise, working and investing.
The first thing that we need to recognize that not all investors are full time investors. Actually, the sentence should be that most investors are either employees or have businesses to run. It is rare to find people who are doing investment as a full time thing. Remember that we are talking here about investment and not trading.
Once the investment item is placed within the general daily routine, an investor needs to start finding out how the investment process is going to take place. What are the investment activities that this investor is going to conduct.
Let us give an example here; a list of activities of an investor could be as follows:
– Reading, hearing, watching news
– Investment mindset books, podcasts, videos…etc.
– Studying the watchlist
– Analyzing individual stocks
– Recording the investment activity of the day.
This is a small example of some activities that could be part of an investor’s investment activity. This step of finding out the investment activities that one wants to have within the routine is the first thing that needs to be accomplished.
This first step of finding out the activities within the investment item could be the most difficult one to come up with; especially if you are just starting out your investment journey.
Once those activities are set or found, the next step is to know how to organize them in terms of priority and time allocation.
Setting Up An Investor’s Routine
When setting up an investor’s routine, one needs to make sure of the investment process that one is adopting. For example, the stock analysis is part of the investment activities. Part of analyzing a stock is reading news about the particular stock or the particular company.
At the same time there is an item called reading news as part of the main investment activities. Does this mean including reading the news of the stock along with reading the news or separating those into different time frames and slots? The reader of course knows that there is no right or wrong answer. Those are different ways of looking at the investment activities and the routine, and each investor should decide what is the best option to follow in setting up their daily and investment routines.
The last thing that we want to mention here is the idea of time frames and slots. We will start with time slots, time slots is the equivalent of setting up priorities. The reader will notice that depending on the complexity of the routine, there could be more routine levels that just the two we explained.
Setting up time frames is crucial. This way you will ensure that you have accomplished what you intended to accomplish when you started your investment activities for the day. This goes for any routine not only for the investment activities.
One can choose to either set a time frame of day by day basis depending on what needs to be accomplished on that particular day, or set up the time frames on the activity level, or at the process level of each activity.
Conclusion
Let us simplify things here. We gave an example to make things clearer. Sometimes when you give an example the amount of options available can become confusing to the reader rather than becoming clearer.
Option in essence are made to make things easy and to give the freedom for the recipient to choose whatever suits the person. For someone who is just starting out, giving too many options might not give clarity to the recipient. The opposite can be result. The recipient might get totally confused to the level of leaving the whole thing and dropping it.
If the recipient finds building the routine as difficult, then the recipient will think that this whole thing is not for him/her.
If one wants to excel or become proficient at anything, then one needs to practice the concept of setting up routines. Yes routines in plural. This article gave us two levels of routines to think about, but reading through the lines we understand that there are multiple routine levels and processes to think about.
We need to remember building one or several routines does not get accomplished in one day. For example, you cannot have an item in your task list saying establishing a routine for this thing. The starting point is finding out what are the activities that a certain item can include.
Every one of us had experience is set up a routine for one thing or the other. I am still struggling with setting up both my daily and investment routines. What is your experience in setting up a routine? or do you believe at all in the benefits of having a routine?
The Investor
Wednesday 12 April 2023
About The Author
I started to look into individual stocks in January 2022. I created this diary initially for myself to track my investing progress, and second as a place that I can share my ideas publicly hoping that others will share their ideas and learn from each other, and lastly as an online business where some links that I share are affiliate links, and if anybody bought anything by clicking those links I will get a commission based on that successful sale, which of course will not affect the price that you are buying the product or service at.
For a more detailed information on my affiliate disclosure please refer to the Full Affiliate Disclosure page, and if you are interested in building your own online business you can check this post here.
Furthermore, this site is in no way or form is giving any financial or investing advice, nor it is encouraging or discouraging people to buy or sell any financial instrument. This is a personal diary in which I track my own progress and share for informational, educational and entertainment purposes.