Category: Routine

8 Essays on Routine, Pattern, and Habit Change (The October Monthly Round-Up)

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

October was focused on the idea of Routine: what is it, how does it show up (or not show up) in your life, and when is it useful? From re-thinking what you spend your time thinking about, to parsing out time differently, to changing up your behaviors in an experimental fashion, it was a good month to focus on the habits that get us more of what we want. Read on to see a round-up of this month’s essays.

Here is a round-up of all the posts on this topic from the last month:

  • Default to Finish: Co you let things slide, or do you finish them? There’s nothing quite as suffocating as letting an idea slowly die. How can you default to finishing behaviors?
  • Eliminate the Thinking: Is everything worth thinking about equally?
  • Change it Up: Consider your life as a series of experiments. Do you change up your patterns often enough?
  • Don’t Use The Full Hour: The clock has wreaked enough havoc on our lives. It’s time to take back control of that minute hand.
  • My Routine: A glimpse into what my present-day looks like, and where I began when thinking about this idea of “routine.”

Plus a few relevant posts from the archives:

Also! If you’re interested in routine and habits, and you haven’t registered for the live seminars I’m teaching yet, go sign up today.

I’m teaching a class on November 9th all about rethinking how you schedule the time in your day and week, and a second class on November 17th all about how to get better at gmail (and email). Readers of my blog can enjoy a discount of 40% off the ticket price with the coupon code SARAH.

Readers of my blog can enjoy a discount of 40% off the ticket price with the coupon code SARAH. The classes will be recorded and a replay link will be sent to you after the live class is finished.

Default to Finish

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

Pssst! Quick note: I’ll be teaching a live-stream class on November 9th all about how to plan your week and set up your schedule. Go register in advance for the seminar here.

Do you finish what you start?

Let’s be honest: we’re pretty terrible, as humans, at estimating time. How long something will take, how much work it will do to finish something, how much energy we’ll have later.

Me? I always over-estimate how much I’m going to want to do something later. I get swept up in the high of the moment, in my exuberance, and sign up for ALL THE CLASSES.

The difference between something that gets done and something that remains unfinished is huge.

Unfinished work feels heavy, difficult, like a burden.

We pile up unfinished projects like additional rooms in a house, never returned to, until we’ve designed a house with 187 rooms and we don’t even know where to begin again.

Finished work — although scrappy, messy, and imperfect — is released. It is put into the world of exploration, of connection, of refinement. Push publish on the draft. Release a thought into the world.

If you only have an hour left to do the work, default to finishing it.

Put a smaller timer on it.

If you only had 5 minutes left, how would you finish it?

So many of my blog posts on this site are the product of a timer and a few minutes. I often set 6-minute, 8-minute, and other short burst intervals to write as quickly as possible.

Do it now or not at all.

This applies to signing up for online courses, too. Here’s a rubric I use and love, that might work for you.

You’re hesitating about signing up to do a new program or a course. (For me, it was Krista Tippett’s course on The Art of Conversation that really called to me.) Did I have time to take it?

If I have time today to take the course, at least an hour of it, then I have time to do it. If I can carve out time to do it now, then I know I have enough wiggle room in my schedule to make it happen.

However.

If I do not have time to do it now — in this moment, in this hour, in this day — then I am already too full and too busy to give it attention. (One way, however, to get around this is to delete something from your life to make space for the new thing. Everything is a tradeoff.)

That’s a rubric for deciding that helps me.

Do it now or not at all.

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How many things are unfinished in your life right now? Leave a note in the comments with your best tips for finishing your work.

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On Wednesday, November 9th I’ll be teaching a live-stream class all about how to rethink and restructure your week. Join me!

Eliminate the Thinking

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

One of my goals is to find a way to minimize the amount of thinking I have to do about any particular subject. My brain is really addicted to thinking. It’s one of its favorite things to do.

But there’s a certain amount of useless thinking that happens about things that don’t need as much brain time on them. For example, thinking every single day about when I’m going to exercise and what type of exercise I’m going to do takes away brain space from thinking about other things.

If I wake up in the morning and I avoid a workout, then I’ve just added that to-do into the docket of things for my brain to ruminate about:

I ask myself at 11am: will you workout now? Okay, there’s a class at 12-noon. But wait — you have a call at 1pm. So later? Yeah, maybe 3pm? Oh, but I just ate. So let’s go at 5pm? Oof, yeah, I’m tired. Damnit. I missed today. Maybe tomorrow.

There are things worth spending brain energy on and things not worth spending brain energy on.

Thinking every day (every day!) about when I’m going to work out is not something that I want to dedicate time to.

All it does it take away brain space from thinking about other things. I want—I crave—this time to go deep into writing. To work on the next chapter of my book. To carve away the mental clutter and focus on work that matters.

And if that is what I truly want, then I need to ruthlessly eliminate all of these other, unnecessary, periods of thinking.

So for workouts, as an example, I have a very boring schedule that I stick to (which I’ll write about another time). It’s dreadfully boring for my vata-type, eager-to-think, overworking mind. There’s no excitement in planning and dreaming and scheming about fancy workouts, and this is by design. I need to reel in my analytical mind and give it different puzzles to focus on.

The schedule is what will let me actually succeed.

When I don’t schedule my workouts, I only end up exercising 2-3 times per week.

When I stick to the schedule, I end up going 3-6 times per week. There’s a very clear advantage to the boring routine.

The criteria for the schedule has to be:

  • So easy I don’t have to think about it
  • Incredibly simple to remember
  • Harder to not do than to do
  • Start as small as possible
  • Ideally linked to some behavior or habit I already do.

With exercise, here’s what this looks like as an example:

I drop my kid off at daycare every day. Same time, same place, gotta do it. (Make it linked to an existing behavior).

So I put my sneakers and pants on, and every day after I drop him off, I exercise. (Wednesdays are my break day: I do this weekdays Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday.)

It’s easier to get to the park and exercise when I’m already in my clothes and I’ve already left the house. (Make it so easy I don’t have to think about it.)

I do it every day. (Harder to not do than to do.)

When I first started that schedule, I only did it for 15 minutes each time.(Start as small as possible.)

Don’t think, just do.

When I think about exercising, all I’m doing is thinking about exercising.

When I set up a habit and a routine that’s simple enough to do the same way every time, I spend more time exercising than thinking.

Eliminate the thinking wherever you can.

How might this apply to other areas of your life? Leave a note in the comments below.

Change It Up

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

If you’re not getting the results you want, try something new.

If the way you’re currently working isn’t getting the results you want, you either need to stay the course a little bit longer (see: The Dip, or “Follow One Course Until Successful”), or you need to try a new way of working.

If the exercise routine isn’t getting you the results that you want, you might need a new exercise routine.

If your pattern of writing isn’t giving you the results you want, you might need to try new systems.

If working alone isn’t getting you to your highest self, perhaps working alongside other people or starting a mastermind accountability group would change things.

Change it up when it’s not working.

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What’s your routine? What are your habits and ways of being? Leave a note in the comments below, or write a post about your own routine.

This post is part of the Monthly Writing Prompts — check out October’s theme, here or get the monthly writing prompts in your inbox by signing up for the newsletter, here.

Don’t Use The Full Hour

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

Most of our default settings look to the top of the clock to start anything.

Meetings go for an hour. We block off time for our commitments in hour-long chunks. Even exercise gets its own hour, even if we actually only do 10 minutes of it.

If you think of time in hour-long chunks, you only have so many hours.

Look up at the clock, it’s 12:34pm. Are you waiting until 1:00pm to start the next meeting or task?

Instead of expanding your thinking to fill up each hour, how can you whittle down tasks to take 5 minutes, 10 minutes, or 7 minutes?

Some experiments worth trying:

  • A daily workout could take as little as 7 minutes.
  • Writing a blog post can be done in 10 minutes. Set the timer.
  • Meetings can start at 11:05am, or 11:10am, and run for only 10 minutes. (Occasionally I like to schedule phone calls to start at odd intervals to see how people are with punctuality).
  • My husband likes to do pushups every time the printer runs. It’s only 60 seconds a few times per day, but it adds up to a lot of pushups.

If you’re not getting it done because you don’t have enough time; why not make less time available for it?

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What’s your routine? What are your habits and ways of being? Leave a note in the comments below, or write a post about your own routine.
This post is part of the Monthly Writing Prompts — check out October’s theme, here or get the monthly writing prompts in your inbox by signing up for the newsletter, here.

Routine

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

Every night, after a day’s worth of pumping milk for my baby, my husband takes the pump from my hands and washes it out in the sink with the special brush.

He shakes it dry, clean, ready for the next day. He says it’s one of the ways he can help with this job that is so much mine. It’s our routine. I pump, he cleans it up. We tuck into bed.

Every morning, after I drop the baby at daycare, I exercise. First things first. I take care of my body. Leo and I walk down the sidewalks by the park and we buzz into the daycare center. I smile and wave at him and he babbles at the daycare ladies. Morning, baby, daycare, exercise.

It’s the routine.

On the weekends, we try to make a stew in the Fall on Sundays. Leo is currently napping, I’m in flannel, writing, and Alex is in the kitchen, chopping up vegetables for a fall stew. We got one creuset deep pot at our wedding as a gift from one of Alex’s mentors, and the blue pot has been filled with stews and soups and creamy vegetables more times than we can count. We fill the pot with a stew and eat out of it as the week goes by. It feeds us and it fuels us.

We enjoy the variation and we sink into the routine.

A routine is a sequence of actions, regularly followed. It can be a routine that you follow in a dance (like a tap routine), or a series of steps you perform as part of a program. It’s often done on the regular, rather than as a special occasion.

“He settled down into his routine of writing and work.” 

“She got into the daily routine of exercise.” 

The word comes from “route,” or a regular, carved-into-the-earth way of getting there. Roads are carved from steady use and repetition. The road becomes a regular way of being.

We carve out our routines, and then our routines provide space for our craft to expand.

My little one loves having a routine. He’s out of the newborn phase (although still a baby), and thrives when he’s given regular naps and feedings. A day of good naps can be the difference between a smiley, content baby, and my fussy, crying-and-wiggling baby. Both are the same kid, on different routines.

Designed well, a routine lets me get more of what I want. I am as many words as I make space to sit down and write. If I spend all of my time thinking about what I’m going to do and when I’m going to do it, I’ve spent my time thinking, not doing. The routine lets me forget the path and get into the substance.

A routine is a way of being. How do you show up in the world? What are the patterns of your life, of your work, of your being?

More than an intention for a day, or a desire for the week, is the importance of setting up good habits. A routine is the invisible structure that lets us dig into what we want to do. Rather than rely on motivation or inspiration — we can settle into the gold that is habit formation.
This Fall, I’ve been craving routine more than anything.

Putting on and choosing (or not choosing) your clothing is a routine. In our household, we’re eliminating most of our clothing (my husband and I share a closet together — one closet, and we each have half of a dresser). We stick to a few basic outfits to stay simple. Why? Because we want to choose ideas and creativity in our work over thinking about year’s worth of clothing choices.

I exercise at the same time every day as part of a routine.

A pattern for the day, a pattern for the work, a system of organization, a structure that provides clarity — and freedom. A cadre, or a frame, can be more freeing than the idea of unlimited freedom.

By creating a routine, I can expand.

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What’s your routine? What are your habits and ways of being? This post is part of the Monthly Writing Prompts — check out October’s theme, here.
Get monthly writing prompts in your inbox by signing up for the newsletter, here.

October Monthly Writing Group: Routine

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

Last week I posed a question in a few writing groups I’m in: would a monthly writing theme be helpful to you as a writer?

Do you want to write about a topic, a subject, or an idea together?

The answer was a resounding yes.

A monthly framework to write: join me for a new theme, each month.

So, let’s write together each month around a topic or a theme. Each month, I’ll put forward a topic for consideration with a call to write.

What’s in a monthly writing prompt?

  1. Read below to find out this month’s theme.
  2. Take the theme, explore it, and anytime this month (October 2016) write a poem, essay, or reflection of your choosing. You can take photos, post on Instagram, share on Twitter, or publish an essay.
  3. Leave a link to your work in the comments on this post. Share it using the hashtag #MoWriting (it’s short for “More Writing” and “Monthly Writing.”)

We can all read through the posts (check the links in the comments!) and get to know more of each other’s work and writing.

October’s writing theme: routines

Welcome to October, a time for introspection, reflection, and turning inwards.

Keeping in line with the idea of a monthly theme (which is itself a pattern and a routine), the first theme is all about Routine.

  • What does it mean to have a routine?
  • What does your routine look like?
  • What is routine, and what is not?
  • Does having a routine help you? When does having a routine not help you?
  • What are the routines in your relationships, your partnerships
  • What is your routine in your work?
  • Where do you want more, or less, structure and habit?

I find myself craving more routine as I take off on my next business adventure (yes, it’s happening already.) I’m drawing and detailing and designing in notebooks. I’m creating structures for expansion, creating places for community.

Why I’m creating this

Writing together has always held me accountable and let me dive deeper. Rather than flitting from one idea to the next, I want a way to dive deeper into a subject and explore it through multiple posts, as well as hear ideas from other authors, writers, and creators I admire. Using monthly themes and habits has been a successful tool in my own practice.

I’m borrowing these ideas from two organizations I admire greatly: Thousand Network has monthly themes for the Thousand Women’s Circle that I’m a part of, and Holstee’s Mindful Matter blog explores monthly themes, which I adore and have written for. So I will add to the room and create a monthly theme here on this website, for anyone who wants to join.

Going deeper with community

One of my desires is to find a way to bring more people together in community. Writing a blog alone is not enough; I want my business and my practice to bring creative people together. When we work together in creative ecosystems, collaborate on work (even if the work is first done solo), and find people to be in community with, our work grows richer and stronger.

Over the past few years, I’ve had a chance to see what happens with community through our writing groups, the Grace and Gratitude workshop, and in the private mastermind that kicked off a few weeks ago. (If you want to learn more about the next round of the Mastermind and put in an application for consideration, sign up here). Each time I admire how much you grow, especially as you learn from each other. If I can design things that bring people together — in community and around ideas — I’m content.

By finding and sharing your writing with each other — and by letting you discover each other through the comments and hashtags — I hope that you’ll all get to meet more of each other. I get to meet so many amazing people through writing on this blog, and I’m searching for ways to bring this community closer together over the coming years.

The prompts are free and the love is abundant!

So, go write about your routines, push publish on your essays and images, and leave a comment below with a link to your piece.