A few years ago, I had a morning routine I followed every day. I later thought to myself that I was being too rigid, so I relaxed the routine. Life happened and my mornings started to get less consistent. The main parts of morning – breakfast, coffee, getting dressed – were there, but the order was different each day. Some days I have to be up really early and have less time for a routine; other days, I have plenty of time but I don’t have the same habit of things to do in the morning that I used to.
This week, I wrote on a piece of paper what I want to do every morning. I have made the list detailed so I don’t forget anything. It includes brushing my teeth, making breakfast, combing my hair, using dry shampoo – which I have just started using and seems to make my hair easier to manage – and more. It has been nice to have a piece of paper that has everything written down.
I am much less likely to forget to do something if I write it down and the words are in a visible place. On a similar note, when I write ideas on one of my whiteboards I tend to think about them a bit more because I walk past them, see the idea, and then start thinking about it.
This is part of a broader feeling that I have had for several months: I want to be more organised.
This goal has a few parts:
- I want my mornings to be more consistent, following a routine with all the things I need to do to prepare for the day ahead;
- I want to keep track of events – from meetings to birthdays – so that I don’t forget, and;
- I want to keep track of my TODOs better.
I am starting with my morning routine and intend to work on the rest in the coming days and weeks.
Related to this, I want to build more habits, generally. I would like to start running. I would like to develop my skills on the ukulele. I would like to write more. To help me keep track, I bought a stack of habit tracker cards and have written the things I want to do. I am not striving to do everything every day, recognising that is unsustainable given the variability in my schedule. But I do want to try and follow through on the things I want to do as much as possible.
Maybe, if this system of tracking works, I can set more goals, like learning a new CSS rule a day – who knows!
My creative mind is very ad-hoc. I can have an idea in the last waking hours of the day and stay up late to work on it, or I can have an idea while I am walking between rooms and I need to find a pen as fast as possible to write it down and explore it. Thus is creativity! You can’t plan an idea – often, you stumble upon an idea as you are going about your day, pondering something that you find interesting and have been learning about recently.
I am curious about how routines could help me be a bit more consistent while not pushing me to do more than I want. I don’t want to write every day; such challenges stress me out. But I do want to writing, even on the days where I don’t have the motivation but probably have something that I could start coalescing into a blog post.
