The Awesome Power of Routine
Get in Winners, We’re Harnessing the Power of Routine
Today’s Shelf Life is about routine and how you can use it to train your brain to make hard things easier. Hard things like writing, which is the hardest thing known to man. Harder than diamond. Harder than lonsdaleite, which is considerably harder than diamond.
I have talked about habits in great length in Shelf Life before, because I think having good creative habits and intentional habit-forming (or habit-breaking, as they case may be) are the best ways to become productive at something you want to do. Consider:
Plus others that don’t have the right keywords in the title for me to find them right now.
So: What’s the meaningful difference between a habit and a routine? Well first of all a computer can do a routine but a computer can’t do a habit. For the sake of today’s Shelf Life, let’s consider the difference this: A habit is the individual action you do, without context. For instance, smoking cigarettes is a habit. A routine is the habit in context of place, time, and circumstance. For instance, smoking a cigarette at the end of your lunch break at work every day is a routine.
Under this working definition, you can have habits without routine but you can’t have routine without habits. For instance, if I write all the time but I do it at random places and times, on different devices and different media (ie, paper versus electronic), with different people each time, eating a different writing snack every time, then perhaps I have a writing habit but I do not have a writing routine. However, without the habit to build the routine around, there can be no routine.
Routine makes habits stronger. You can ask anyone who has ever smoked and they can explain this. As a former smoker I am qualified to make this explanation. If you have the habit of smoking cigarettes and you have certain routines that involve smoking cigarettes, those routines reinforce the habit. Let’s say you smoke a cigarette every time you drink coffee. One day you decide to quit smoking. Good for you. This is hard as heck but a huge investment in your health and general, you know, odor.
Quitting the habit is hard, but you can chew gum, suck on a lollipop, fiddle with a fidget spinner, or do whatever you need to do to distract yourself. You can use a nicotine patch to cut down on the chemical craving. But every time you reach for your coffee mug your brain is going to go, “Cigarette now???” The routine includes the habitual consumption of two things together (cigarette and coffee). If you were going to keep smoking but quit drinking coffee, you’d likely experience somewhat of the same thing in reverse—for instance, when smoking your first cigarette of the morning, you brain might fumble around looking for the coffee.
However, most cigarette-smoking coffee drinkers do not have a one-to-one coffee-to-cigarette consumption ratio. That is, there may come a point in the day where one stops drinking coffee for the day but one is not yet done smoking. Maybe you have three cups of coffee per day but ten cigarettes. It may be that all your coffee is consumed with a cigarette but not every cigarette is consumed with coffee.
Apparently you learn a lot from ten years of being a smoker. Maybe everyone should try it. What do I care? This isn’t Health Life. Anyway, here are the takeaways so far:
Habit (or habits) plus context equals routine.
Multiple habits may be part of a single routine.
A single habit may be part of multiple routines.
Routines reinforce habits.
Human brains are neat in many ways but the way I’m thinking of right now is that human brains are excellent at pattern recognition. According to Mark. P. Mattson in this 2014 Frontiers in Neuroscience article, “an evolutionarily rapid expansion of pattern processing capabilities is the major reason that the human brain has capabilities considerably beyond those of lower species.” Pattern recognition is our jam. A routine is a pattern of behavior and the human brain loves that kind of thing. This is what I’m getting at.
I would like to suggest that not only does creating a routine around a habit improve your ability to maintain the habit, but also routine makes execution of the habit easier and better. That is, in addition to improvement in your ability to execute the habit that you build through practice (repetition), the routine supporting the habit also helps your brain take shortcuts to doing the action (the habit) better.
Let’s say my habit is going to bed every night at nine. This is not a habit I have, by the way. But in a more perfect world, one in which they never turned on the large hadron collider, Harambe is still alive, and Hillary Clinton is wrapping up her second term as president, perhaps I regularly go to bed by nine. That’s my (theoretical) habit.
Going to bed every night at nine may help me fall asleep faster as I get used to going to sleep at the same time every night. That’s the improvement I might get from regular practice.
However, let’s say I have additional routine around going to bed at nine. Maybe alternate-universe-excellent-sleep-hygiene Catherine’s routine contains the following habits:
Always sleep in my bed, never on the sofa or anywhere else.
Drink a cup of chamomile tea.
Wash my face and brush my teeth right before bed.
Spritz my pillow with a lavender scent.
Get in bed right at nine.
Listen to a relaxing sleep cast.
Doing those things all together creates a routine of taste, touch, scent, action, and sound alongside a specific place and time for the activity. What this does in my brain—again, in theory—is create a cognitive shortcut that these sensations mean “go to sleep right now.” The brain recognizes a pattern—chamomile flavor, mint toothpaste, lavender smell, bed, droning voice, dark room—that means sleep.
Or you could just take a sleeping pill, it’s way easier if I’m honest. Alternate-universe Catherine would never but this-universe Catherine is a maverick.
Before I talk about creating good writing routines to support your writing habit, let me talk about one more habit and routine I have, which is the Shelf Life–writing routine.
I would dearly love to be ahead on Shelf Life. I would dearly love to work on Shelf Life on the weekends. I wish I could work on Shelf Life during my twice-monthly writing groups. But I cannot do any of these. I can write Shelf Life starting at seven o’clock in the evening, on Monday and Wednesday nights, at the desk in my office.
Physically, can I write Shelf Life another time, day, or in another physical location? Yes—but I write more slowly, and I don’t generate ideas as abundantly, as when I stick to my usual routine. Trying to write Shelf Life on a Saturday afternoon, or on my laptop in the living room, takes considerably longer than writing it at my desk at the appointed time. The routine supports the habit. Keeping the routine helps me start writing more quickly, I write faster once I’ve started, and in my own opinion I write better—yes, I have more and better ideas, but the quality of the finished article is also better. In my own opinion.
A lot of times Shelf Life is about how you can learn from my fails. Shelf Life is a chronicle of things I have tried that failed, so you can avoid these things. Or it’s a chronicle of things I’ve tried in response to a previous failure. Today’s Shelf Life is an opportunity to learn from my accidental win. I didn’t create the Shelf Life routine on purpose—frankly, I created it mostly through procrastination and laziness—but with hindsight I can see how it came into being and how its existence helps me write faster and better. You can use the benefit of my hindsight.
Take my hindsight. Please.
This guidance for establishing a routine would work with anything—not just writing or another creative habit you want to bolster. It could be a routine for cleaning up your work inbox regularly or scrubbing your bathroom down or whatever.
Remember, some habits are “positive” habits (for instance, exercising) that we want to encourage and some habits are “negative” habits (for instance, smoking) that we want to break. There’s a third category of habits: Neutral habits we have that we don’t necessarily want to encourage or discourage. Drinking coffee is a neutral habit for me. I don’t drink enough that it’s bad for my health, but nor do I think it’s an especially beneficial habit that I need to cultivate. It’s just a thing I do. I enjoy drinking two or three cups of coffee a day so the habit supports itself.
I think it follows, logically, that pairing neutral habits with positive habits is a good thing to do, but pairing neutral habits with negative habits is unwise, because a routine formed around a neutral and a negative habit together will create an association between the two. Then, doing the neutral habit will encourage the negative habit.
Think about the context you can use to create a routine around your writing habit. The circumstances you should consider include:
Place where you will write.
Time of day when you will write.
Duration of time for which you will write.
Tool you will use to write (laptop, paper and pencil, tablet, voice recorder, et cetera).
Food or drink you will consume while you write.
Candle or wax melt to create a specific scent.
Music playlist or other noise (like white noise) to listen to.
Bonus points for any of the above items if you only use them during your writing time. That is, if you have a specific food item that you eat while you write, bonus points to you if you only eat that food when writing. I believe that creates a stronger association between that flavor and the writing habit.
You don’t need to make every circumstance a part of the routine. You don’t need to involve every single sense. Just a handful of circumstances create plenty of context to make a routine.
Maybe a freewriting routine looks like:
Use my laptop. (Tool)
Sit on my sofa. (Place)
Morning time. (Time)
Drink my first cup of coffee of the day. (Flavor and Scent)
Freewrite for thirty minutes. (Duration)
If I follow this routine, over time I will start to associate elements of the routine with freewriting. If I sit on my sofa in the morning, it will remind me of freewriting. Pouring my first cup of coffee of the day will remind me of freewriting. Picking up that laptop in one hand and a coffee in the other—yeah you get it. In this way, the routine helps keep freewriting on my mind and encourages me to do it.
Further, when I pick up my laptop and my morning coffee and plunk down on the sofa, my brain will recognize that pattern and get into freewriting mode immediately. Less time wasted trying to get “in the right frame of mind” to freewrite—the routine takes care of all that.
It can be really hard to make yourself start a creative activity. Every time you do a creative activity you make yourself vulnerable. You take your private thoughts from a place where they are untouchable and you bring them into the outside world where someone else could see them, read them, and even criticize them.
You know what it’s really easy to make yourself do? Sit on the sofa and drink a coffee. Trust me on this, I am an expert.
Once you’ve decided what will become part of your writing routine, put the whole thing together and try it on for size. Make sure you write down the elements before you start so you don’t miss any. After your test run, cross off any elements that you don’t want to build into the final routine. Like if drinking coffee was going to be part of the routine but a specific time of day was not, maybe don’t include the coffee unless you’re fine with drinking coffee at any time you might be writing. If the music you chose was distracting, or you realize eating this snack every time you write is going to ruin your diet, or whatever—change it around. Iterate and test again until the routine feels good and sustainable.
A final word: Remember, there are many pros to creating a routine to support your desired habit, but there’s a con as well. When you cannot enact your routine, it may be “harder” to do the habit. Just like it can take longer to fall asleep in an unfamiliar place, writing may not be as speedy if there’s a disruption to your established writing routine. I definitely experience that when I try to write Shelf Life at two in the afternoon. That said: For me, the benefits have outweighed the detriment by a large margin.
TL;DR: If making yourself sit down and do the darn thing is just not working, try adding a cup of coffee or a cigarette and see if that works.
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