I would never have said, “Embrace routines,” when I was in my late teens and early twenties. Those are the heady days of personal freedom when society allows you to act on your whim to do whatever you want to do with your time and life. Outside of schooling, you have very little responsibility or accountability. You are free as a bird to soar or swoop or just sit on your perch and indulge in curiosity as you see the world go by.
I saw myself as creative (performing arts) and curious (a voracious reader of just about everything within my sight) Routines meant robbing my time from spending or lavishing my attention on whatever I wanted to do. I thought of routines as wet blankets on my enthusiasm and zest for experiencing life! I had a disdain for schedules, time tables, timelines, and rote methods because it meant being like everybody else; mundane, average, boring, unimaginative, and above all, being bridled! (Hmm, it makes me wonder where the word bride originated!! LOL)
However, as soon as I turned twenty, I was in a different world literally! (Married and migrated to America as a student’s wife and soon to be a mother.)
The heady days of personal independence were behind me, and responsibilities as a wife, mother, and homemaker called for a more disciplined approach. As a housewife, I still had some leeway to eschew some routines and take time out for other interests. In time, as my family grew, and I became a working professional, I began to feel the need to have control over my life and my time. The “Work-life balance” issue started rearing its head, and I felt a need to gain some control. Slowly, I began to stick to time schedules and establish routines and rituals to accommodate all that I needed to accomplish before another day dawned, demanding my energies.
To my utter amazement and relief, I discovered that precisely for the reasons I avoided routines, i.e., its mundaneness and its predictability, they freed up more time and energy to do what I wanted to do. I just had to juggle my priorities a bit.
How did I find more time and energy just from following the routines?
Once I figured out the best process to accomplish my goal, my brain did it automatically! That ball of soft fleshy gray matter and all it encompasses took over and coded my routine into an automatic program after I faithfully repeated it for a few days! A human brain is an efficient organ, which is programmable. It likes to conserve energy by turning a well-defined routine into a memory (analogous to digital coding) that can be recalled immediately by external triggers. You do not have to think freshly each time you encounter the same stimulus. In essence, a routine is a device that saves mental energy and results in efficient execution of tasks to achieve the desired result. Can you imagine what it would be like if we had to think anew every time we encountered the same stimulus? What a waste of mental energy that would be!
Let us define routine. A routine is setting up an orderly process that produces repeatable results efficiently when appropriately followed. It simplifies the questions of what, why, when, and how of performing tasks through a systematic process. When repeated consistently, it turns into a programmed memory in the brain’s functioning. You can perform a function without engaging your mind extensively each time you work on that specific task. In essence, you have created a shortcut to quickly and efficiently access a method for performing particular tasks, thereby saving time!
The human brain acts pretty much like an order-taker. It does not judge if the order is good or bad; it just executes the order. The onus of judgment is on human conscience or consciousness, to act on it or not is the function of frontal cortex in the brain. The caveat is to recognize that like the digital programs, it follows the ‘Garbage in, garbage out’ principle. So, if a set routine improves your life and time by allowing you to pursue creative interests, more family time, peace of mind, happiness, a clear conscience, or a sense of accomplishing your goals, it is a good routine.
However, if a routine results in distracting you from your real purpose and results in procrastination, angst or anxiety, abandoning projects, or completing only after a waste of resources, it is not the right solution. Faulty, illogical programming is the cause behind most self-sabotaging habits.
Before a routine becomes a habit, ask yourself, will help me in the long run or hinder me? If the answer is that it will derail you from success in the long term, then shun it. If not, then embrace it! You may win the work-life balance battle, and even find peace and joy at the end of the day. Maybe even time to daydream!
Try it, you’ll like it!