I Hate Routines. But I Need a New One.

Ugh, routines.

The "LinkedIn influencers" love to prattle on about them:

• The morning routine to crush LinkedIn by 9:00 AM.
• Did you know the basis for a productive day is a productive morning routine?
• Good Routines... Healthy Habits... Better Behaviors... Best Life.
• Establishing Evening Routines to Optimize the Day Ahead

Routine salespeople set out a buffet of options:

Goal setting. Cold plunges. Meditation. High-intensity training. Feedback loops. Schedule setting. Bed-making. Meal-planning.

Your task is to determine what ingredients to load onto your plate in hopes of "optimizing your productivity so you can crush your goals."

Then have that same meal day after day.

In one sense, I get it.

Routines Enable Success

Routines are safe. Efficient. A way to track progress to a goal.

Routines can bring sanity to a complex, choice-filled world. Who wants to spend 20 minutes every week figuring out peanut butter? Ten years ago, I made my wardrobe a routine by creating a personal uniform for this very reason.

Routines are the path to completing big projects. I've written books. I rewired a Jeep. I've coded complex websites. These all required sticking to a routine.

Good health also requires a routine of eating right and exercising.

Routines are Dangerous

And yet, I hate routines. They can be dangerous.

Not happy with your lot in life?

Find someone who has what you want, duplicate their daily routine, and you'll enjoy the same success.

Sounds kinda silly to say, yet that's the premise and promise of articles like this and this and this.

Call me cynical, but people like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, or Jack Dorsey aren't successful because they printed a listicle from the internet and stuck it on their fridge.

Some of it was sheer luck. Or luck plus rich parents.

Bezos and Zuckerberg admit as much.

Routines can become a religion offering salvation through daily "worship" and goal achievement. But a completed goal doesn't always bring contentment or a sense of accomplishment. You just get another goal.

Stay on that treadmill, just make it faster and steeper.

Routines are Blinders

I got fired from my first software development job. My employer told me I had become a distraction to the other programmers and to the business.

Which was true.

Because I was excited.

The thing I was excited about?

The internet.

It was the mid 1990's and all the industry buzz was about the new World Wide Web. My employer developed office productivity applications and I thought we could improve them by connecting to the internet. There were also these new things called "home pages" that customers might pay us to create.

But the owner had a successful business model that identified customers with needs that we could fill with custom software.

A routine.

A cash-generating routine.

Yet, the successful routine blinded the owner to a significant shift in the technology landscape. 18 months after the he stood up in an all-hands meeting and said "We aren't going to do anything to support the internet" the company was gone.

Routines are a Fast-Forward Button for Life

This is my biggest beef with routines.

More so the older I get (actually, I'd be curious to know the average age of the routine-promoters - I'm guessing it's under 40).

The more routines you have, the more each day is like the next.

The more alike your days are, the more one day melds into the next. Monday might as well be Wednesday and wait, is it Thursday or Friday?

Nothing unique about a day means nothing memorable about it. Time speeds up. Suddenly it's the next season or the next year or your next birthday.

55 already? Where did that year go?

Variety slows life down. We found the best provider of variety was travel. Regular new sights, sounds, tastes, and new locations kept the days unique. Those experiences are bookmarks in our memories. Years are geolocated.

Routine Refresh

We're in the middle of moving from rural Missouri to downtown Tulsa, OK.

Mostly because of routines.

Our Missouri routine isn't healthy. We don't move enough. MsBoyink and I are both overweight. It's not just us - even the CDC found that people living in rural areas exercise less.

And our Missouri routine is, well, boring. There isn't much going on in our little town. Going out to a brewery to hear some live local music means three hours of driving, another $25 in gas, and a late night getting home.

It's enough of a hurdle that we don't do it. We've become couch potatoes.

So, in another 10 days we'll pack up a box truck and head west.

Like so many others who chased their dreams in the same direction.