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Reflecting on Routine

Reflecting on Routine

Some thoughts on routine as of 9/19/2023

The irony of this post is that I am trying to get into a routine of writing on Sundays, and yet put off this writing until Monday Tuesday. The good news is that I have another opportunity this week to have some better discipline!

I will say at the outset that I am biased in favor of routine. Perhaps it is a product of school and playing various sports that followed a regular weekly schedule for the majority of my life to date, but I think in a world in which the only constant/guarantee is change, having something relatively stable to fall back on is quite useful.


Once I hung the cleats up, I realized that I had a lot of unstructured time for the first time in my adult life, and I had to figure out how I wanted my days to look. A year is made up of months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and so I started with a morning routine in the spring of my senior year. Taking full advantage of the time between football/academic/social responsibilities and the daunting responsibilities of the real world, I designed a routine where I would wake up more or less with the sun, go on a walk, do some reading/journaling, and then go exercise. These were genuinely some of the best weeks of my life from a physical well-being standpoint, and I credit it mostly to that morning routine.

For the past 15 months or so (since starting full-time employment), routine has been a bit trickier, but I have tried in earnest to have some semblance of a consistent routine. In my opinion and experience, the mornings are the best time to try and formulate a set of habits because they are often uninterrupted time and you can show up relatively consistently to them. I have had to start work between 6 and 7 am over the past year and so this has entailed waking up between 4:30 and 5:30 Monday through Friday for substantially all of the past 15 months. This may sound miserable, but I actually believe it to be one of the things that has kept me happy and healthy, to the point where I can say I believe I am in the best shape of my life.

As Ben Franklin said (or so I’ve heard), “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” I would probably substitute wealthy with happy given the fact that I have seen a pretty strong increase in my own happiness through waking up early and the habits that have come along with it. I am not sure how waking up early would directly make me wealthy, but maybe those benefits are on the come.

As of now, my morning routine is to wake up, work out for an hour or so, and then take a cold shower prior to starting my work day. I think some degree of “self-induced suck” every day is good for the soul. Especially in a work context or whenever I encounter some adversity, doing hard things consistently - and especially when every fiber of your being aggressively is telling you not to do them - just serves to prepare the body and the mind for the inevitable hurdles that arise in day-to-day life. There are several other routines that I try to do consistently such as taking vitamins, certain dietary practices, and then some reading and reflection in the evenings. However, I find that when I put things later in the day or before bed, the circumstances of the day can pull me away causing me to push off tasks or forget to do them. I am very grateful that my current schedule allows me to work out in the mornings because I find evening workouts have far too much variability, reliant both on the diet and activity levels of the day to that point.

If I had some more time that I could squeeze into the start of my days, I would like to also incorporate reading and reflection, since I feel those are vital to my overall well-being, and yet I fail to devote as much time as I would like to them. I like the concept of reverse engineering as a generally helpful tool/exercise, and so it has been helpful for me to think about my priorities or goals and then think about the actions needed to get from A to B, and then incorporate those actions into some sort of structured routine so that they actually get prioritized instead of lost in a neverending to-do list to be taken care of “some-day.” One of my favorite quotes - “tomorrow never comes.”

A lot of psychological and scientific studies that I have encountered have touted the benefits of routine, and there are numerous best-selling books about habit and routine, so I understand that it is not contrarian or novel to explain how helpful routines have been in my day to day life; however, I do feel that there is a big gap between knowing and doing. It is no secret that eating minimally processed whole foods instead of ultra-processed junk food and empty calories will have a laundry list of benefits to people’s physical and mental well-being, but it is hard to through the grocery store and resisting the allure of the center aisles.

I think almost everyone knows logically that they would benefit from mapping out some deliberate set of behaviors that they can incorporate into their life, but perhaps not enough realize how easy it is to action, and also how once you start, it actually becomes easier.

I did not intend to go here when starting this post, but given these are mostly ramblings, I suppose nothing is off-limits. This reminds me of the paradox of choice and the concept of decision fatigue. Tangentially related to those topics is discipline. I almost feel like it is easier to be disciplined when you start to make these habits part of who you are and take away that choice. Working out is important to me, and so in the mornings, I work out. It is that simple. Even if it is raining, or cold, or I did not sleep well (there are minimal exceptions - but very very rare), I know that when I wake up, I am going to go work out. Even if it is the worst workout of my life, I will go do it. It is funny how sometimes on the “worst” days, once I actually get into the rhythm and over that initial hump of reluctance and resistance, I get a huge boost in energy and affect.

If I instead made it a choice each day of whether should I work out or hit snooze and go back to sleep, I think it would be mentally exhausting and I would not bet on the better angels of my nature winning out. The bottom line is, for the important things in life, the best way to actually prioritize them is to remove the negotiation, and simply make it a part of “what you do.”

There are also negatives of routines. A current authority figure in my life is pretty anti-routine and regimentation generally, believing that in a dynamic world, trying to stick to a routine can leave you dead in the water. I am of the opinion that this misses the forest for the trees. A quote I recently encountered that I found a lot of value in was that “the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.” Obviously, this is in a religious context, but the underlying point still holds and I think transfers well.

As long as you can mentally tweeze out that building a routine is to serve you and your goals (which can and should adapt over time) instead of you being a slave to a routine, then I believe quite strongly that routine is one of the most foundational aspects of my current stage in life, and I would be far worse off physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually without it.
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