I’m actively trying to build a new routine. On the first day of that new routine I did a stream of consciousness exercise to capture everything I was thinking about in that moment. I’ve decided to publish it, lightly edited, as a potentially useful glimpse into the mind of someone who is trying to deliberately build a new routine while using the self-knowledge gleaned from years of personal experimentation. The specific details of what I’m trying to do here may not be relevant to you, but the categories of reflection below may help you unlock challenges you’ve faced in your own endeavors.
Check out the entry for this experiment in my Deliberate Experimentation Dashboard for a rougher but more real-time look into how this is going, too.
Routine as Archaeology or Creativity?
I love routine. A good routine feels like uncovering something that has always been there and building something completely new. “Uncovered” because there’s a sense of comfort and a sense of, “Ah, this is how things should’ve always been,” when you land on a routine that works but “built” because it’s very rarely something that shows up fully formed. It gets modified, torn down, rejiggered, and tweaked over time. Eventually, it solidifies into something simultaneously essential and also not part of your deliberate consciousness. Essential because its absence is keenly felt (or, more positively, doing it propels you to the next part of your day with the right mindset and the right momentum) and subconscious because it’s nearly automatic.
I have a slate of routines. Some are relatively fresh and still being built. And others have become so automatic I may have trouble noticing them as routines. Right now, as I write this, I’m trying to lay the foundation for a new routine related to writing. My hypothesis is that I can spend roughly 7:00-8:00 AM nearly every day doing some kind of writing (or writing adjacent) activity. That writing may not always look like this — a nearly stream of consciousness draft focused on getting as many words out of me as possible — but could include editing previous writing, outlining in preparation for future writing, or even doing deliberate research and note-taking.
What I’m most interested in, though, is whether I can make this 7:00-8:00 AM block something sacred.
The Mechanics of Potential Self-Sabotage
While the foundation to this routine is brand new, it’s being built in a neighborhood of much more mature routines. Its neighbors are “Wake Up at 6:00 AM” and “Read For Awhile Right After Waking Up.” These two routines have been bedrocks for as long as I can remember. In fact, “Write From 7:00-8:00” could be thought of as being built on property previously claimed by “Read For Awhile Right After Waking Up,” because “awhile” has usually included time beyond 7:00 AM. I guess that means “Read For Awhile Right After Waking Up” needs to become “Read From 6:10ish to 7:00.”
I’ve played with this routine in the past and have watched it start strong only to fade over time. The most common force that overtakes it is a sense of anxiety over what my upcoming work day entails and feeling like I need to steal time away from writing in order to be properly prepared for what’s coming up later in the day. It would be foolish of me to think this will never happen. Sometimes there’s a major meeting in the morning that requires my attention in the early morning hours in order to be adequately prepared for it. Sometimes things get overwhelming and reserving some time early in the morning to do “real work” helps restore the equilibrium I need to feel good about my job. But these can be exceptions and they don’t need to represent failure to the point of abandoning the original intention of writing for an hour in the morning.
I have worked hard to become a very productive and focused consultant. I can accomplish everything I need to accomplish during a normal 9:00ish to 5:00ish work day. I take those hours extremely seriously so that I can have this guilt free time in the morning to work on my craft. And, even more importantly, I try not to conceptualize myself as having set “work hours.” It’s easy for me to fall into a trap of thinking my job is to work a certain number of hours each week when really I need to consistently be thinking about my work as creating outcomes that matter to my clients and The Ready. Those outcomes are divorced from a set schedule. Sometimes the most impactful work I can do is take an entire afternoon “off” and think through a problem. Sometimes it’s sitting down to work through a problem after dinner. 9 to 5 is a useful default constraint. Useful in the sense that it’s what I hold very lightly as an ideal. I can transcend it when it makes sense to but otherwise it’s a good chunk of time that allows me to order my life outside of work.
I know I need to be vigilant about that part of me that thinks I need to work early in the morning to prepare for the rest of my day. I wonder if there’s any part of that drive that’s based in self-sabotage? “I can’t be a writer because I have this intense job that requires me to work a ton of hours. Oh well.” There’s probably a small part of me that subconsciously thinks this way. I know there are things I can do, though, that helps keep those thoughts at bay.
I think a lot of it actually starts the day before. When I don’t crisply end my day it can feel like I’m carrying a lot of amorphously open loops with me throughout the evening and into the next morning. Crisply ending my day means taking the ten to fifteen minutes at the end of the day to truly end the stuff I’m working on and set some intentions about when I’ll pick them up again tomorrow or later in the week. It’s about looking at my calendar for the next day or two and figuring out what I need to do to feel prepared for whatever is coming up — and when I’m going to do that preparation. When I’ve done those things my brain can let go of the anxiety that drives me to spend time in the morning making sure I’m completely and utterly prepared for the day —time that I’m trying to invest in writing.
I can also set myself up for success by doing my best to not schedule meetings early in the day. Early meetings are the #1 thing that make me feel like I need to use the time between 7:00 and 8:00 for consulting work. Anything that happens at 10:00 AM or later (or even better, after noon) makes me feel like I have time to prep starting around 9:00 AM.
What Does ‘Writing’ Even Mean, Though?
What about how to use the time itself? What am I supposed to be writing or doing during this newly sacred block of time? The simplest answer is, “Writing.” The somewhat more specific answer is, “Working on writing that will help me move my career into a more writing-centric mode.” Articles for public consumption and anything that might become a book are at the top of the prioritization list. Writing of a completely personal nature is fine, too since that writing is often the seeds that sprout into something bigger. Where it starts to get a bit more fuzzy is when thinking about the work that has to happen around writing that isn’t actually making words appear. Editing, researching, taking notes, etc. My thinking, as of right now, is that every day should consist of at least some actual writing (maybe “drafting” is a better word) and that as long as I make some net new words appear I can use some of the remaining time for editing, thinking, taking, notes, and researching. What I want to avoid, though, is spending this time reading or researching and somehow tricking myself into thinking that I’m doing what I set out to do. I could imagine spending the whole time, even the whole time for a couple days in a row, reading and taking notes on something. But it’s something I’ll need to keep an eye on because it’s a very attractive escape hatch for my particular type of brain. Writing is hard. Reading, researching, and thinking about writing is easy (and fun).
There's a bit of a wild card, here, that is also worth exploring for a moment. When I’ve done this in the past the writing I’ve focused on has been 100% focused on non-fiction. I’ve never even considered writing fiction before. For whatever reason I’m feeling the smallest of itches telling me to explore writing fiction. I don’t know where that voice is coming from but it feels like I should honor it. I have no idea what form it’s going to take but I’d be very okay if this morning writing session became dedicated (or at least partly dedicated) to figuring out what that voice wants to say. I’ve never thought of myself as a fiction writer and my gut tells me that I’d be terrible at it. I’m so goddamn literal and rational all the time. But also, life is long and my interests are varied. God knows I read a lot so why not try listening to the voice that says it wants to be a fiction writer and see if anything comes out of it? Nobody ever has to see it. Expectations can stay comfortably low and I can look at myself squarely in the mirror and say I didn’t hide from trying new things.
The Mechanics of Execution
The mechanics of this intention are interesting to me, too. I’ve already talked about the timing, 7:00-8:00 every weekday (weekends are to be determined). That’s because I’ve learned that going right from waking up to writing is really tough for me. I’ve tried that experiment and learned that my brain takes a little time to wake up and reading a book and drinking coffee for the first 30-45 minutes of the day is basically the best part of my day. In the past my brain has rebelled when I tried to make it write first thing in the day. It/I get mad about having to give up the best part of my day to do a difficult thing and eventually my willpower dries up and I’m back to not writing. So, this time around I’m trying to use this self-knowledge rather than ignore it. Starting at 7:00 gives me enough time to read and get that first cup of coffee in me.
Other mechanics to think about include what I’m actually doing the writing on and what my environment is like during the writing session. My inclination is to do the writing on my iPad rather than my laptop and external monitor. Laptop + external monitor is where I spend 95% of my normal workday. I like the idea of shifting this decidedly non-consulting activity away from the tools I used to do my regular job. My iPad can become my default writing machine and my laptop + external monitor can become my default everything else machine. I think it’s possible to build associations with different tools and environments and to that end I think I’ll try to listen to the same music every morning, too. Tycho already has very strong associations with productivity and writing in my brain, so I’m going to milk that for all it’s worth. If it’s between 7:00ish and 8:00ish and I’m writing I’ll have Tycho being piped into my ears.
One last thing to figure out, then, is how to end each session. I’m a big fan of parking on the down slope so that it’s easy to pick up where I left off in the following session. The literal way to do that is to stop in the middle of a sen…
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