I was going to post something similar. I cannot stand letting my life fall into any sort of repetitive routine. I exercise, but I vary type, locations, duration, time, and everything else.
When I find myself doing the exact same thing every day I think of it as grinding towards the grave without ever doing anything original. Life is full of new experiences, unless you are just placing one foot in front of another for 2 hours a day on a treadmill while watching a screen.
It's a pretty dim view of a lifestyle others love but I don't care of it at all. I guess I guess love chaos too much.
I totally understand :-) I actually agree with you.
The cool part is, I can keep building on top of the repetitive routine, and these additions are the variation for me. The hour of coding before the gym (and getting up an hour earlier in order to do it) was a recent addition, and took some time to achieve as a habitual thing. That's what keeps it interesting and exciting. I don't succeed right away with these additions, they take time. However, the power of habits is when they are actually habitual (and are good habits) and you don't use energy and willpower to accomplish them - that's what I tried to focus on here.
The thing about rituals like this one is that they don't even feel planned anymore after awhile, they just happen. Once their somewhat automatic it frees you up to think about other stuff while you're performing them.
This is exactly the case. I didn't sit down and decide that I would do the routine exactly as I have it in place right now, that developed over time. I started simply with an exercise habit. Over time, I've been able to build on it as each component has become so habitual that I don't think about it.
A great article, and you must be commended on your dedication.
That said, it reads almost exactly like the opening to "American Psycho". Sure, Bateman's routine is slightly different than yours, but both narratives have the same affect.
Best of luck, and I can't wait for your article on business cards!
Haha! Totally understand it can come across that way.
The point I was trying to make, which I've clearly not succeeded with, is that I don't actually plan it as it happens, and I don't think individually of all these details as I do them. I'm not a robot with an algorithm of each step, going through them one by one with perfect precision. Rather, if I sit down and think hard about literally every step that I go through, this is what the routine is. In my mind, I think of none of it - it is completely habitual and I'm on autopilot. I can do the whole routine without expending much energy, so I have all the energy for other things - the more unexpected things that come up and we need to deal with (happens plenty in a growing startup).
One can think of rituals vs. “thinking through each step” in life as using high-level vs. low-level programming languages, or abstractions.
Abstracting out doing things that are good for you into a “habit layer” seems unlikely to turn you into a robot or inhibit emotions (as rfugger suggests). Instead, it may allow to focus on higher-level activities and decisions. You can still switch abstractions and go low-level anytime if you have to, if benefit-cost ratio is high enough.
Also, there's probably a lot of unexpected and interesting things happening around that you can notice even as you do your ritual thing. (Important though is not to contemplate on them, at least for me it can destroy the ritual very quickly.)
Yeah, you've explicitly mentioned it was your experience, so I shouldn't have said that you “suggest” it.
I should also admit that, although grandparent expresses the idea I had after reading Joel's comment, myself I don't have that orderly life and many good habits. More of the opposite, actually, and I also often enjoy making decisions on-the-fly.
I find the abstraction analogy appealing and inspiring, though. It probably could help people like me, whose stumbling point in forming and following habits and rituals is the lack of motivation.
For me, ritual is great, but too much ritual can turn me into a robot. If I choose the right rituals for my autopilot program, I may be a fitter, happier, more productive robot, but I'm still a robot. The appeal seems to be, to paraphrase Simon & Garfunkel, that a robot feels no pain. Constant ritual keeps the demons at bay -- ask any autistic person.
I've learned, though, that to feel truly alive I need to turn off the autopilot, feel the emotions that come up, both painful and joyful, and accept the way that they demand to inform my direction on a moment-to-moment basis, often in ways contrary to what I had planned. That's life.
Even though he has some routines, there are still challenges and creative parts inside of these routines and the routines just make it easier to get into these tasks.
