The Power of Routine
We are currently living in an interesting time. Stuck at home with little to do but stare at the same things (or people) for weeks, maybe months. One of the most common advice given to people on how to make the most of this time is to create a routine. This is a checklist of things you want (or have) to get done at a particular time. If you’ve never been capable of creating and sticking to a routine, this might be the best practice session you’ll ever have for the rest of your life.
But why are routines so powerful? Simple, it is one of the best ways to hack your brain to automate difficult tasks and make them easier. I’ll share concepts from two books and my personal experience.
Book 1: Willpower — Roy F. Baumeister & John Tierney
There’s hardly anything beneficial to humans in the long term that doesn’t seem hard to do consistently. Exercising, eating healthy, getting up to work, learning a new language, you name it. With some bouts of motivation, we can get up to exercise once but doing it daily requires much more than motivation. Waking up early is possible for a day or two, but consistently getting up early takes much more. Snoozing that alarm is almost always the easier option. And, of course, binging the next Netflix show is way easier than writing that 3000-word paper.
Our brains are wired to go for the path of least resistance, especially when it doesn’t seem harmful in the short term. Choosing between Netflix or the 3000-word paper is not a life or death decision. Because of this, it is always easier to choose the Netflix show over what we’re supposed to do. When we finally get ourselves to get down to work, it seems we have no energy left. Doing any other productive task becomes even more difficult.
The idea is that willpower is a limited resource and it gets depleted with every decision we make during the day. The harder the decision, for instance, writing the 3000-word paper instead of binging the next show, the bigger the willpower depletion. And once willpower is depleted, it becomes almost impossible to get things done without first refilling our willpower.
Following that concept, what routines help us achieve is a way to make the difficult tasks much less difficult, making it easier to conserve our willpower. It reduces the decision fatigue associated with difficult tasks. If you exercise every day for 20 minutes, it gets easier the more you stick with the routine. If you do your laundry every Saturday at 10 am, the 100th time won’t require as much thought as the first time. The more a task is repeated, the more we do it unconsciously hence reducing the brainpower involved and in turn using less willpower.
Book 2: Atomic Habits — James Clear
This is similar to the concepts of willpower except with a lower barrier of entry. For example, it might be an extremely difficult decision to exercise for 20 minutes, but it is much easier to do a 1-minute workout. Reading a chapter of a book might seem daunting but reading a paragraph seems easier. Breaking down the difficult tasks into much easier steps makes it a very easy decision and it can compete easily with the other easy decisions in our mind. From the above example, a decision between a 3000-word paper and Netflix makes the latter extremely easy. But if it’s a decision between writing a paragraph and Netflix, then both decisions are on par in terms of difficulty.
Something important to note is that it is much easier to create a routine than follow it. This is why the idea of Atomic Habits makes it much easier to create and stick to a routine. Create something easy that competes with the other non-productive choices. Want to exercise? Choose to do 5 push-ups a day. When you’re used to that, increase it by very little periodically. Want to read more? Pick up a book and ready just a paragraph a day.
Creating an easy routine can help build the habit of following through on plans and helps create the foundation for more challenging routines in the future. Doing something, no matter how little is much better than doing nothing at all.
Personal Experience
Waking up early. When I initially decided to get up early every morning, it wasn’t the easiest thing to do. I snoozed my alarm more often than I liked. However, I kept at it and managed to get out of bed most of the time. A trick that helped was placing a really loud alarm beyond my arm’s reach so I’d have to get out of bed to stop it.
After months of forcing myself out of bed at the same time every day, something started happening. I started waking up minutes before my alarm without needing more sleep. This usually happened when I go to bed around my usual time. I had managed to create a sleeping routine that made it much easier to get out of bed exactly when I wanted. I still have some days where I struggle to get out of bed, especially when sleep after my usual bedtime, but those days happen much less often.
A similar trick made it easier to exercise regularly and to read more. My mornings are very predictable. Wake up, read the bible, exercise, make breakfast, shower, and eat. This routine is a lot easier these days than when I started. I also started with easy exercises like 20 pushups daily before adding burpees and a bunch of cardio much later. To help with my reading habits, I currently read for just one hour a day in the evening. As long as I read just a little every day, it’s better than not reading at all. To be honest, everything seems predictable and sometimes mundane, but the impact of having such routine has made it much easier to find time for a steady exercise, work, eating healthier, and fun hobbies like photography and learning French.
As we’re only human, there will be days, sometimes weeks, of demotivation. However, the routine makes it easier to get back on track as it’ll be easy to know exactly where to pick things up again. Start small. Start on your terms. Copy no one. Create a routine that is easy to do every day and increase the complexity gradually. Want to exercise regularly? Maybe start by doing 10 pushups a day for a week, and then increase by 1 the following week. Want to read more? Maybe start by reading a page every day and see how you can proceed from there. Whatever it is, lower the barrier of entry, take the first step, and you’ll be surprised how easy it is to keep going.
