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.