Nothing reminds me so much of the value of my everyday get-up-and-do-stuff routine as when I step out of it for a few days.
Every few months I take on a weird side project (for pay) that becomes all-consuming. A contract here, a part-time gig there, and always an interesting side-quest from the main project of my semi-retired creative life. The week before I wrote these words I was at it again, up north having a little adventure in the rural Canadian prairies.
And while the details change, the post mortem is almost always the same: I have been decoupled from my routine and then I need to spend a week or two trying to find the routine back.
Routine is, after all, a cognitive shortcut for feeling productive. Whether or not productivity is your end goal, or if the effort it is meant for something less clinical and more spiritual, routine is often way more important than we give it credit for being.
Routine is habit. Routine is a temporal obligation to be somewhere doing something on a clockwork regularity that, bluntly, gets stuff done.
For me, routine is sitting in a cafe for an hour in the morning sipping a hot drink and typing something, writing, making, creating with a regularity and scheduled purpose. Without the routine I may get it done, but more than likely I would not. Deciding with a planned regularity that this is where I need to be and when I need to be doing something means I don’t need to find the motivation or overcome the paralysis of deciding: it is just due.
Terms FROm this POSt
- cafe
- Chances are the words you are reading were written in a small local cafe on a quiet morning with a hot cup of tea at my side. The places we work and create have a huge influence on what emerges.
- Canada
- I write these words (mostly) from a small city on the Canadian prairies. It is written with an international audience in mind, but I don’t convert my units, hold my jargon or drop my elbows for readers beyond our borders, eh?
- post mortem
- Pardon my business jargon and please look way from my slips into Project Management Speak: this is less grim than it appears, and merely another of those goofy office terms to point at any kind of analysis done after the wrap up of an endeavour as to get ones mind around what went right and what went wrong.
- value
- I use this word a lot on this site but I’m not always referring to cash money. There are many ways to find value in something: emotional, nostalgia, spiritual, environmental, social, and countless other personally meaningful ways. I do find the assumption that everything always comes down to coins in the pocket, but that might just be being disappointed with spending fifty years watching the capitalism struggle to deliver on anything meaningfully human.
