Tag: Routine

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Find A Routine Because Busy Is Bullshit

The Gods gave us the ability to improve.

However, it HAS to be consciously used, or it will wither away.

Life has a funny way of finding your time and abusing it for little benefit:

  • Think about how often you are on Slack, or texting, or digging through email.
  • Then think about those side projects, the time with family and friends, and the coworker coffees.

Now think about what impact that either option has had on your career.

If you read this post, I would like for you to try to create the space to do at least one of those things this week and make it into a routine.

Any reminder app is helpful (whenever I start a project, I spin up about 8-10 daily reminders, ranging from “Water up” to “Class time”) and I have never seen a single career that needs someone to be “on” for 100% of their time, so spare me the “I’m busy” excuse (then watch this video)

Think about what that will mean in a year.

Remember, the first step is the hardest.

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You Never Do One Thing

Remember Pringle’s “Once you pop you can’t stop?”

I used to laugh at it until I noticed how our lives build on habit and routine.

All of our actions tie themselves together. There is never “just one time.”

Whenever the easy route comes about, think that over.

Most “bad” people started off with good intentions.

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Give Yourself Freedom

Declare yourself crazy

One reason why we don’t unleash our full selves is that we are worried about how the rest of the world thinks.

You know who doesn’t care? “Crazy” people.

So, I’ll give you an easy out.

Today, call yourself crazy.

That noise you make when you do something well?

Do it.

Anytime someone looks your way after, just tell them your crazy and walk away.

Two things will happen:

  • You’ll start feeling more comfortable in your skin, improving the work that you do
  • Your coworkers may decide to start getting crazy too.

If everyone is comfortable with themselves, they start getting uncomfortable with routine.

That’s where the fun happens.

 

 

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Late but…

Doing something is better than nothing

The alarm clock is going off.

This sounds regular, but this time, you have a sinking feeling. This feeling doesn’t feel right. You look at the clock.

Suspicion confirmed, late again.

You kick off your blanket and swear like it could slow down the clock.

After you tumble into the shower, you grab your toothbrush and start to multitask as if your life depends on it.

From here, you have two options:

  • Run out the door as soon as possible
  • Do the rest of your morning routine, but in a rushed and shortened way. 

Your best bet for having a smooth day lies in the second, counter-intuitive option.

You are late. 5 – 10 more minutes late won’t end the world.

Use that time to find a center with your routine.

It’s not perfect, and you won’t cross all the T’s or dot all the I’s, but your rhythm will fit.

The reason for this is that our brain works on rhythm (or system one thinking) to get through the day. It doesn’t take much for the brain to feel comfortable, merely starting the habit gets the brain where it needs to go.

When you don’t get to the habit, then you spend energy. That’s why the rest of the late day feels terrible; your body is trying to compensate. 

Something is better than nothing at all.

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The Hidden Phone Update – It’s Working Out Well

Two weeks ago, I decided to hide my phone before bed.

So far, I’ve noticed:

  • A marginal increase in my “before bed” sleep quality.
  • Incentives work.
  • A massive increase in my post wake-up quality.

I thought that not having my phone around in the morning would just speed up my routine. Instead, my phone absence motivated me to do my work.

It’s improved my discipline when it came to morning habits.

 

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Checklists Mean More

I never knew something so simple, a routine checklist, could have profound results. The check lists I use have effected my habits. What was a random morning has now turned into a real routine. That routine has become positive. I can now start to time my mornings, something that had eluded me in the past. I enjoy the effect it has had on my life, and being consistent with some of the things on those checklists allow me to feel and be better.

As much as I love checklists, the idea of that consistency taught me something else. I have learned that your understanding will grow with anything if you use it consistently. I have noticed with each week I use my checklists, small improvements appear. Nothing huge, but simple things like batching certain tasks, using time, what theme that they belong in, and using different colors all change my mood hand help me get things done. It feels mundane, but the checklists I started with look vastly different from the ones I use now. The ones I use in the future will look more different still.

When I looked at them from afar, check lists were static tools. They were the same thing, day after day, boring anyone who dare viewed them. Now I see the idea itself is a skill, to learn how to show the things that are happening in life, codify them, and distill them into a list of things that matter. If you keep working at it, this skill will improve. Like many things in life, the idea of the checklist is simple, but the concept itself can bear many gifts if you are open to receiving them.

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Reading For Ideas

Reading is the idea machine. People have written many things, from life’s secrets to how to cook the perfect scrambled eggs, and usually for the price of 10 dollars, you could have access to that very idea.

For the last 3 months, I have spent time at night reading before bed. At the start of the year, it was 10 minutes, but the practice has grown and I have recently moved it to an hour. An hour gives me about 6 books read a month. It hasn’t been a heavy investment, just an hour before I go to sleep I turn off everything that can ever bother me and just read.

These books are a cross-section of disciplines, ranging from the cognitive sciences, philosophy, business development, language etc. Sometimes the subject is heady – I can’t devour this all at once, only a few pages at a time. It can also be lighthearted and fun, and I can’t wait to devour every single page.

Either way I try to limit myself to spare my energy. These ideas are heavy, connecting thoughts from each discipline together. It is exhausting, especially after a full days schedule. My willpower takes tests, but I do feel it grow stronger with week, and without struggle there is no progress.

Even after 3 months, the advantage is clear. The result;my ideas get better, gaining more insight into my daily actions, how I act, respond, and what I do.

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Organization & Routine

Organization has always been difficult for me. I don’t keep things neat at all. Throwing things around always felt normal, and I never really mind when it becomes time to find things. I just became better at retrieval, when I was in my house especially, at taking some time to find what I had thrown about recently.

This all felt normal until I decided to take the challenge of making my room clean. I was a classic example of the male bachelor, clothes thrown everywhere in the room, trash bandied about, and a messy bed. I would call in a maid every few months and get a brand new room, only to have it collapse in a week or so.

That changed when I made a routine at night to clean up the floor for at most of 5 minutes. I ordered a maid and made it a point to start the night after she left. Very little to do, it felt like I could carry out something with no effort. It was a little win, and it was nice to have a clean floor.

It has been three months, and I woke up this morning realizing it has been a long time since there has been even more than 5 pieces of clothing on the floor. The power of the habit has amazed. No more than 5 minutes a night, cleaning my floor. I wish I had known this when I was younger.

The habit has expanded to the trash being taken out and the dishes being washed, and they too, went from mounds of work to about 3 minutes a night of keeping my apartment clean. Small wins matter, and hopefully, this can translate into my creative life. Organization is key for me to free up mind space, and getting my external world in order should help me get my internal engine going.

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Figuring Things Out

I didn’t arrive to work late this morning, however, I did get up late. I did better than Wednesday and Thursday. That is to say there is improvement. I feel pretty content in that part of it at least. The only bad part is I didn’t get a chance to knock out my post before I left work.

Its funny, before I took the time off, I would have thought that the office was the best place to write. It was where I am used to working, and I got a nice set up with two monitors and a pretty decent PC. With that said, after working at home, I got to enjoy the peace it offers.

There was some serious silence and I could do some serious thought with the posts. As I am in the office now, I have a coworker talking to me, a desk full of trinkets in front of me, and I know at any time I could be pulled away to do something that would take me away from getting this done.

So – while I am happy I have this all set up for me to work, I would prefer to get all my writing done before I get into the office. This makes my 2 hours before leaving work a little more important now, and I also know I should appreciate it a bit more.

With today’s improvement I am still sleepy. I have to crack open a red bull, and I am starting to consider that a failure. I really want my sleep to be effective. With great sleep comes great work.

I fell asleep at around 1 again last night, although I did it right, I got water and a CPAP, I would like to get that down to 11:30, so waking up at 7 gives me close to 8 hours of full rest. The CPAP helps me maximize my sleep while I am in bed, but I would love it if I can add the sleep plus the CPAP.

If I leave the house at 9:02 I catch the same 3 train. Although the ride is nicer than the 2 train, I end up at the PATH station 2 minutes too late to catch the train to get me to work right before 10 AM. I arrive at work around 10 05 – 10 10, but I would prefer to in before 10 to please anyone that is watching.

I feel like I will get better at this, because with each habit, I am getting better. I am noticing the flaws, and making small subtle improvements with them. So, with that said, I feel like next month I will be making better use of my time.

Well, at least when I get here at work it is causal Friday.

Simplifying my day is important to me. I am starting to become a real believer that if I get my pile of work down, and i can choose 2 or 3 things to work on per day, Ill be able to turn in and finish a lot of things that I have sitting here.

I want to do this, not because I love the company, but I see everything currently as temporary. I do think that all of my habits are currently going to carry on with me as I move on in life, so getting them perfected, especially my work habits, will ensure that I am never in too rough a place.

I want to be somewhere where I can relax mentally, without looking over my shoulder and worrying when the next bad thing is going to happen to me. These habits have helped me find some sort of peace.

I have left work everyday this week without fearing that it will all go wrong. That in turn makes me not hate this job so much. Even though I plan on leaving this place in a few years, I do want this to be as smooth sailing as I can possibly get.

I cleaned my desk last night 30 minutes before I left. I think I will try to end my day doing that, simplifying my work space as much as possible. My goal is to have the most simple, pure workplace, filled with fun, but as organized as I can get it.

This goes directly against everything I have ever done in life. I used to revel in disorganization. It gave me a sense of pride – look, I can just throw everything around and still get things done. Every time I would try to organize, it felt forced, like someone was making me do it, and in turn, i started to hate authority.

That hate for authority really slowed me down as a person, because I threw away many opportunity’s just to give a big fuck you to anyone who would “stand in my way”.

As I get older, I realize the mistakes in my ways. I realize that for the most part, the world doesn’t owe me anything or is out to get me. In fact, the world mostly doesn’t care.

Anything I do to hurt me just hurts me in the long run. What I am saying is, whenever I put that obstacle in my way, I only made myself worse. I hurt myself twice, one in disappointing the person who was – for the most part – just trying to look out for me, and two myself for fearing my own success and failure. Which, I am learning, is really the same thing.

There is no getting over the hump if the hump is just you. So around my 26th birthday I figured a lot of this out. Now my goal is to improve what I have and make sure I go into my 30th birthday with something I can build on.

There is no getting over the hump if the hump is just you.

Do: CPAP, Push ups,Night Wrap up,To-do, Water, 3 Things
Don’t: 16/8 , Vegetable Juice, Meditation, Thank you

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Trying to be Smooth

I was late again this morning. I got out of bed at 8 15, which is something that I wanted to avoid. It is a full hour over when I should be getting up, which resulted in a late start at work, something that I still need to figure out how to get out of.

I feel like I am slipping when this happens. I was able Tuesday to get out the gate here at work, and start working as soon as I got it. It was a good feeling, even if I had nothing to really do. I see the difference with how I work when I have a clean palate in the morning, and I tend to be distracted when I don’t.

No rest for the weary. I have to keep up with this, and do it everyday. If I can make it for a month, Ill be able to latch onto it. I am quite happy with a clear slate for a month. If I can do that, who knows what I will be able to think up and get accomplished. Just have to execute.

With that said, I was a little tired when I woke up. My sleep times have been creeping towards 1, with no practical reason to be up that late. I would like to train myself to sleep at 1 and wake up at 7 due to me maybe being on late night, but for now, there is no reason to be up that late. I may not even get it. So, I will be monitoring my sleep times, and pushing them back to a healthier 12 and maybe 11 some nights to make sure I am well rested for the upcoming day.

I am currently redrawing my lines for the workplace. I find that while I am good with a clean room, and I see it spreading to a clean house, my office space is still a mess. I want to be able to come to work in a clean area, and I am not doing it.

Clean area, clean mind. It is where I want to be in all aspects of my life, so I have to start getting it in all areas of my life.

Why be good in one area and not good in another. I have to establish some office habits to improve my work habits. The rest of this week will be devoted to researching what I actually do. I want this to be smooth sailing just like my mornings and evenings are becoming.

I will be breaking this down into morning office and night office routines. I will be bringing my coffee and pills over and try to make it a habit of getting things together here in the office. Making a smooth transition from beginning and ending an office day.

I want to make this work…

Therapy last night was very good. I got to discuss some of the things that have been bothering me at work. Not being able to work from home has been a bit of a hamper on my work schedule. I would also like to know when or if I am getting the raise I was due.

I have to make waves in getting some of this stuff done. I realized some of this is my fault, but I need to get that part under control. From there I can get a smoother office experience.

The other half, and maybe the whole session really, was based in my fear of speaking to people. I can do it fine when I am drunk, or oddly enough, I can do it great when I am in person next to people. What I am not good at is calling and re-connection. It is keeping the stove warm in relationships that eludes me. I have this internal fear that people don’t want to speak to me, and I rationalize it when I don’t call.

Adding automation to this I think, is imperative for me to be better at it. If I am forced in the conversations, I will be better at talking, even if it is something simple as a text. I have to talk to people. I have to make connections.

If I can sync this up, ill be stronger in everything else I try to accomplish. Discipline.

Its hot today, and I guess summer is here. I also guess that my electricity bill will be quite high in the coming months. I want to compensate as much as possible with the roommate situation. A little more money will help me a bit in getting this other stuff under control.

I probably will be running my air conditioner all summer long with no breaks in between. I know that it will be a tad more expensive, but peace of mind is worth the price. I remember the summer I moved to the city, and it was quite hot. I just had a box fan, and for the most part, my apartment was miserable. I hated being home, and I hated my apartment until late September.

I have a lot more people living in my apartment now, so I better keep it cool.

Comedy at Bar None today, and I want to work and get back into the rotation there. I need to get the habit of being in places every Thursday, and Zito’s show and the Pear once a month isn’t cutting it. I need to add maybe two more shows every Thursday.

I want to build another skill, and I think I am adding Vine to my list of things. Even if I stink, I would like to have a body of work for people to look at. I might as well get on the ground floor because I have an iPhone.

If no one cares now I can scrap it in the future. What is the worst that can happen.

Do: 16/8 | CPAP | Wrap Up | 3 Things | Push Ups | Water
Don’t: To Do | Vegetable Juice | Thank You | Meditation

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