I need an efficient routine

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I'm not managing my time as well as I need to. I just don't have very thought out go-to agenda for the day. And my planning/implementing process is chaotic. Outside of work, I don't have many obligations, I want to use the opportunity to study engineering curriculum, organize my possessions better, do hands-on electronics projects, and organize my job information.

Here's the daily routine I want to have:

Wake up in the morning, eat breakfast, drink a large glass of water. Take a shower, get dressed, wear shoes and socks. Do cleaning tasks like dishes, or trash.
Go to the gym within 3 hours of getting up (bring a snack and laptop)

Do a routine until finished or experiencing nausea
Study on laptop
Repeat these steps (the more, the better)
Have the snack when feeling hungry

Return home
Eat a meal and have a medium glass of water
Work on a project
Get ready for bed (haven't worked out a good bedtime routine)

Here's why I think I'm not doing all of this:

I am sluggish in the morning (I am not a morning person at all). I tend to stall and not know what to actually study or what project to work on, or where to even start.

I think part of the failure is because I haven't planned my goals out better, I have ideas, leads, and an overall direction, but few discrete goals or steps.

Part of it is just my lack of discipline, I keep getting on the internet and wasting time, I just need to put the hard brakes on this type of behavior.

The other disruptor is the projects themselves, when I get one started, I get so caught up in them that I won't go to the gym at all. Luckily, there are only a few heavy ones left.
Maybe I should just take the hit and dive into them until they are finished (I really do need to organize my things better). I need to work out a better planning process for my projects too, being inefficient eats up lots of time and I've been inefficient.

Maybe I should write out all of my plans, routines, and layouts on a document to keep better track of them. But I need to commit to one at a time.

TLDR

I think I just answered my own questions about my shortcomings in organization and efficiency. Thanks to anyone who followed along. I'd be glad to hear how anyone else stays organized and on task.

It sounds like you are scheduling too much.

You may want to schedule a gym a few times a week.

It may be better to start off with a short list of simple things to build a routine. Stuff gets easier with practice.

I don't think the schedule is completely to blame, sure its full, but it isn't rushed. You're right that following a shorter list is a good way to start, that's where I'm at right now. But I need to rise to the full schedule, I just won't get anywhere in life if I don't strive towards what I want. I think that under-planning and under-organizing are the things that cause me to fail, it's hard to know what to do next if I don't have something lined up.

Thanks for responding to such a long op.

You are trying to achieve too many routines at once. Work on one or at most two areas at a time. Sounds like your morning routine goes ok, so now work on a bedtime one. For me it is end-of-day medications, grooming (teeth and face), feed pets, set up my breakfast for the next morning, elevate my feet 1/2 hour while watching t.v., then lights out. The thing about a routine is it kind of cues your body what's happening, so you feel ready to do what your body is supposed to do - whether that's be alert or start settling down.

It's very much easier to start a routine if at least part of it is rewarding. For instance, I used to read the Sunday New York Times on Sunday mornings, something I really enjoyed. (Especially the puzzle.) Another example: I used to take a sauna when I completed a swim - but ONLY then. No swim, no reward!

Once you have a particular routine established, it's quite easy to get a new behavior going by chaining it to the established routine. Maybe you need to spend some time in your morning routine with a planner (appointment calendar, to-do list etc.) so you know how to allot your time.

Good luck. It's probably not going to be as hard as you think, if you break it down into manageable segments.

Thanks BeaArthur, the gym routine has a built-in enjoyment, those study sessions are a break from the exercise. I like e-cigs and coffee, maybe I can tie them to a task instead of just using them as a crutch.

I decided to bite the bullet and organize all of my things. I've spent the last couple of days getting rid of things, and organizing the rest. I live in a cramped area, so there isn't much room to even sort things out, and my stuff was starting to spread out. I now have things partitioned into clear bags, bins, and boxes, if you don't count the furniture, I have about 2 or 3 car-loads of stuff.
Most of my things are electronic-related, one of my earlier projects was making a circuit testing board, it saves me lots of space, gets a lot of functionality from my tools, and makes the work easy.
The boxes are all sorted out and labeled. I might map it all out to keep better track of things, but they're already tidied up and out of the way. The bags make it really easy to group my stuff, and the bins make it easy to put it all out of the way

The planner is a good idea, I'm not sure what kind to use, maybe a clipboard or a grid-paper notebook. I am going to start my gym routine next week, I'll know how successful I was by then.

I tend to make up lists. I put all the things I would like to accomplish in the next few months down on a piece of paper. Whenever I complete an item, I cross it off.
For example - fix the lawnmower.
But then if something else come up like clean the gutter, I add it to the list.
So in that sense it is like a rolling list. You add to or cross off items as completed.
The list is my way of focusing on tasks. The lists is a very strong way of focussing.

Also I do not put non-task related items on the list like "Have the snack when feeling hungry".

I think I'll make a template for all the suggestions here and laminate it, it'll be easier to manage things with a dry erase marker and clipboard than getting lost in a notebook. I can cross things off that way too.

The list in bold sums up to a goal. The snack part is just a piece of planning, I can get hungry after all the exercise and I still have studying to do.

Organizing is a very intense activity and requires me to keep at it until the end, so I didn't have time to do more than the first part of the routine this last weekend. I'm now organized enough to do the routine with way less disorder / messes cropping up.

Someone once said that successful people have 3 things figured out: One of them was the benefits of streamlining your day; instead of having to choose what to eat, wear, or pack every day, you figured something out ahead of time and minimized all the effort.
The other part was treating attention and decision making like a finite resource, and that by not having to figure out basic things throughout the day, your mind was more freed up to focus on more important information. It also meant that more social media posts in the day exhaust your focus, and that exercise helped nurture focus.
I don't remember what the other point was, I really should have saved that post because it was all good information.

I have the food and clothing system worked out, so there is virtually no decision making between waking up and getting to the gym. I have a simple, flexible, and effective routine for exercise figured out. I've also done some research on internet learning sites and have material lined up to study. I also have a few project ideas to follow on instructables.
With all of my equipment now sorted out, I should be able to organize my projects and manage them without making messes.

I'm off to a rocky start, I had more social calls than usual this weekend. It sounds cold and calculating (and probably is), but friends and family really don't encourage self improvement, they just want to hang-out, and I really feel like I'm cheating myself when I spend half the day watching shows with people.

I at least hit the gym and re-learned logarithms. Back when I originally took algebra, I was under a ton life stress and taking shortest quarter; logarithms didn't make sense the way the rest of math did. I just reviewed the setup, terms, and rules. My calc classes almost exclusively used natural logs when dealing with logarithms, so I got by this whole time not knowing how to change bases. I feel a lot more comfortable working with logarithms now.

Next week, I'm going to try to make it out of the house before any distractions come up. I'm going to use khan academy to revisit a lot of calc material, that'll be at least a few more weekends.