The Power Of Routine

I was talking to a friend recently and I described my Sunday morning routine of coming downstairs, making a hot drink, going to my seat at the dining table in the conservatory and sitting in front of my laptop ready to write my blog post.

It seems like a simple routine but it is one that I have religiously followed for four years now and has resulted in hundreds of blog posts. I clarified it is not a superstitious approach for me because sometimes I change the direction I am facing but I am always in the same space.

Most of us have routines that we follow to get things done – routines to get the kids to school on time, get homework done, get to work early and stay on top of all the spinning plates that we have.

One of my secrets to getting things done and accomplishing my goals is leveraging the power of routines because this leads to habits and habits beat motivation any day in helping us to consistently move towards our goals.

I don’t have set routines for everything but I can see the differences in my accomplishments across the goals with set routines and those without set routines.

I love how John C Maxwell puts it in the quote that says, You’ll never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.”

Have you ever wondered how successful people become even more successful? Yes, we know they build a good team around them, but what about before they could afford to have a team? How did they do it?

For many of them, you will find that they made positive choices and repeated those choices every single day without wavering for the most part. For an author, this might be a choice to write 1200 words every day even if they don’t feel like it or don’t really like the quality of that day’s writing. They train themselves to make writing a habit through leveraging the power of routine.

Most of us dream of getting fitter and healthier but only those that leverage the power of routine show up consistently at the gym, come rain or sunshine. The routine means they don’t look at the weather or consider other distractions.

If their routine is to make the 6.45am Pilates class every day, when the alarm goes off, they go into the routine mode and get out of bed, brush their teeth, dress up, grab their keys and leave. They don’t stop to think of anything else.

For the rest of us for whom this is not a routine, we probably look at the time even though we set the time for the alarm to go off and know why we did. Instead of just doing the needful, we groan because it’s 6.15am already and wonder how that happened; we then consider how tired we are, how comfortable the bed feels, we remember we woke up to use the loo and disrupted our sleep, then we remember there’s also a midday Pilates class so we don’t really have to make this one.

I could go on and on to paint an even more vivid picture but you already get the gist that we most likely stayed in bed and still didn’t make the so called midday class because that was never really going to happen anyway. It was just a temporary excuse to make us feel better about our flakiness concerning the morning class.

So what can we do?

Clarify your goals

Establish the goals that you are willing to be committed to. We can all come up with grand ideas and goals but be unwilling to pay the price to accomplish them. So the important thing is to only put on paper the goals that we are willing to follow through on. You don’t need many of those but you need the right ones.

Clarify the steps and processes

The next thing is to brainstorm and create the key steps that will help you accomplish your goals. Put these down on paper. Be as detailed as possible because you will need to turn them into daily actions and commitments.

Consider the enablers

The enablers are those factors that will support or hinder your goals. When my boys were in primary school, I was studying for some professional exams. I knew I couldn’t really study when they were active or needed to be tended to. So one of my enablers was to create a study time that was impactful enough to help me accomplish my goals. I learnt to go to bed at the same time as them so I could wake up a few hours later to get in two hours of study every night.

Turn your actions and enablers into your daily routines

For me this is the key to the jigsaw puzzle. Until you form unbroken routines, your progress will remain slow with many goals unaccomplished. So turn the steps into routines by having a starting point and an end date in mind. Do your best to keep the routine going.

Have your back up plans in place

Yes even with the best of intentions some routines are broken – a child is ill, you catch the flu, a work trip comes up or an unexpected assignment pops up in your schedule.

You need a couple of other plans for days like this. What is that backup plan that you can activate? What is the recovery plan to get you back on track? A back up plan can be an alternative time to still get it done e.g. decide to record a programme you would have watched live or put your thoughts on paper when you are on the road.

As a writer, a recovery plan could be that you would increase the number of words you write for the next five days to make up for the two days of writing that you missed. Thanks for reading and sharing my post with others. And do let me know of any tips that help you.