Embracing Routine

There is something scary about routine. Doing the same thing day after day makes a lot of people nervous. But creating a routine is crucial for happiness and reaching your goals in the long-term.

Each day, you only have a limited about of energy and attention. Using it to decide what to do with every minute of every day will burn you out and make you unproductive.

The path the productivity and contentment require embracing structure and routine in your life; keeping consistent with your wake up times, your eating, your work times.

Day to day routines and structure in your life helps you get stuff done but more than that, it gives you a foundational sense of self-esteem. If you set your day up in a way that guarantees you get better every day, you can sleep easy knowing that you are making forward progress.

Whether it is getting better at work, getting healthier, gaining strengths, moving closer to a goal, we are hard-wired to feel happy when we are making progress.

But it is easy to lose sight of the progress you are making. Especially if you do knowledge work, it is possible to feel bad about your work, even though you are getting better and others are happy.

The incorrect perception of non-growth eats at self-esteem and slows down real progress towards your goals. If you don’t have positive activities structured into your day, it is easy to get stuck in a negative spiral. To start to feel like you are losing and experience less confidence day after day. When you get caught in this spiral, the first activities that get dropped are the healthy and long-term oriented activities as you replace them with attempts at short-term escape.

That is where structure comes it—routine activities that you do every day to make sure that no matter how you feel when you wake up, and no matter what emergencies come up during the day, you are becoming a better version of yourself in a small way and you are recognizing the progress that you are making. Those small daily steps forward compound over time, building up into big accomplishments over the long-term.