WHAT IS THE DAILY MISSION?

Essentially, the Daily Mission is a to-do list for your day, to ensure you win the day. It is a list of non-negotiable tasks that you must complete every day, regardless of whether you feel like or not. When you add something to your Daily Mission, you are making a promise to yourself that you will complete the task every day, rain or shine. If you complete your list of tasks, you have completed your mission. You have won your day.

WHY DO I NEED A DAILY MISSION?

You need a daily mission. And here’s why:

• Consistency is Key – In order to accomplish your long term goals, you need to execute the little things on a consistent basis. You can’t climb a mountain without taking the first step. And you can’t reach the peak without slowly but taking the steps necessary to reach the top. By doing things consistently, they become habits.

• Momentum – When you start your day by completing a task on your mission, it will feel good. The more critical tasks that you knock out, the more momentum you build. The more momentum you build, the more you will get done. It all bleeds over to your relationships, your work and your life. You become unstoppable. When you complete your task on a regular basis, you will build a streak and you won’t want to end your streak. Streaks are powerful.

• Motivation and Purpose – You day needs to have purpose. It needs to mean something. Once you start having a mission for your day and consistently winning the day, you’ll start to notice something. You will wake up in the morning and actually be excited about your day, rather than dreading it. You’ll be excited about getting started on the things you promised you would do.

• Self-Confidence – By completing your Daily Mission, you’ll start to increase your self-confidence. We lack confidence for a lot of reasons but the main reason this. We tell ourselves that we are going to do something and we make promises to ourselves. And then we break those promises. By writing down what you need to accomplish (the promise) and getting those things done (keeping your promise), you begin to develop unshakable confidence in yourself. It’s not what you say you’re going to do. It’s what you actually do that matters.

• Starting is the Hardest Part – With any task, whether it’s picking up your guitar, cleaning your house or working out, the hardest part is starting. The Daily Mission allows for you to set small daily goals for any task. Let’s say you want to get in the habit of working out. One of your daily tasks could be ‘Workout for 10 minutes’. You click start on your timer and start working out. That’s the hard part. But you can do 10 minutes right? 90% of the time, you will feel good about starting and will fly past the 10 minute mark. Sometimes all you have is the 10 minutes and you should feel great about moving your body for 10 minutes.

• Discipline – This is a crucial part of your Daily Mission. You need to strive to complete it every day. If you have ‘Go to the Gym’ on your daily mission, you go to the gym, regardless of how you feel. You might be feeling down, depressed, tired, hungover, sore, or unmotivated. But you need to show up anyway. That’s how you develop discipline. By doing the things you said you were going to do, even when you don’t feel like doing them.

• Procrastinate Later – “But Jay, I am really bad for procrastinating.” “I waste all day doing _____.” Here’s the beauty of The Daily Mission. The Daily Mission allows you to create a list of a number of tasks, let’s say 5 for example. Once you complete those 5 things, you can do whatever you want after you’re done. By completing your 5 tasks, you have now earned your guilt free leisure time. You have given yourself permission to do anything you want because you followed through on your tasks. My time waster is video games. I use the thought of playing video games as a way to motivate myself to power through my must-do tasks of my Daily Mission. And once I’m done, I feel accomplished and can do whatever I want for the rest of the day.

• Live Every Day Like it is Your Last Day – Tomorrow is not guaranteed. All we have is today, so let’s focus on just one day and make it the best day possible. Just win the day. A day that will bring you the most happiness, the most growth and a day that will give you sense of peace. You get to decide what you focus your time on and what you don’t. You get to decide what will help you grow as a person and what won’t. At the end of the day, this is your life and you are responsible for what happens in it. Live for today. Do that every day and you will have a collection of great days, which will lead to a great life.

Live Like There Is No Tomorrow

WHAT TASKS SHOULD I ADD TO MY DAILY MISSION?

I recommend starting with a list of 3-5 tasks that you want to complete every single day. Download a Habit Tracking App. I use the app Habit Tracker. Or you could simply use a notebook. List the 3-5 tasks you want to do on a regular basis. For example, my current Daily Mission is as follows.

Remember, this is YOUR life! This is your chance to really think long and hard about what you want to do every day. What are your goals? After reading through my list, you’ll notice that my long term goals are likely in line with personal development, health and fitness and becoming an established author. But what are your goals? What do you want from your life? It’s your list. That is the beauty of it.

Things come and go from my list, depending on my short and long term goals. ‘Writing 1000 words a day’, turns into ‘Rewriting’, which eventually will change to ‘editing and formatting’, and eventually ‘Marketing’ my newest book.

You’ll also notice that some of the time requirements are short. Rewriting my new book for 30 minutes sometimes turns into 3 hours. But at the bare minimum, I HAVE to show up and write for 30 minutes. Every. Single. Day.

WHAT IF I DON’T COMPLETE MY DAILY MISSION?

Life happens. You won’t always be able to complete your Daily Mission. But if you execute your Daily Mission, if you win even 80% of your days, you will make unbelievable progress towards your long term goals. And you will look back at the end of the month, at the end of the year, and you will see that you won more days than you lost. Way more. And that will give you a sense of accomplishment and a sense of peace. It’s not about perfection. It’s about progress.

DOES THE DAILY MISSION REALLY WORK?

My wife and I both work shift work in Emergency Services. We have four kids. Our life is chaos at times. On top of my full time employment, I am working at becoming an established author. When I finished my first book, many of my friends and family first offered congratulations. The second thing most of them said was, “How the heck did you find time to write a book?”

I found time because I made the time. Writing a book is a daunting task. It’s hundreds of hours of writing, re-writing, and sculpting the story prior to finishing it. The only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. I started by adding, ‘Write 500 words per day’ to my Daily Mission. Some days the words would pour out of me. And other days, it was a struggle to writer 500 words. But I showed up every day and wrote. Day after day after day, until the first draft was completed. I then changed the task from ‘Write 500 words per day’ to ‘Edit the book for 30 minutes a day’. And so on and so forth, until the book was completed and I self-published it.

This is not to brag that I wrote a book. It’s to prove that the process of the Daily Mission works to accomplish your long term goals, even when your life is busy, messy and chaotic. Because that’s what life is. There will never be perfect time to do anything we want to do. We just have to start and execute on a consistent basis until it is done. And then it’s time to set new a new goal.

It doesn’t just work for writing a book. It works for any long term goal, whether it’s learning a new language, building a business, getting in shape, achieving financial independence, anything. I used it to get in the best shape of my life at age 39.

Much More Than Just a Physical Transformation

Try it for a month. Download the Habit Tracking App. Write down 3-5 tasks to complete on a daily basis. Show up consistently, build momentum, increase your confidence and watch your dreams slowly start to come true. It’s completely up to you.