If I want to do more of something, say writing, I have to schedule time for it. This is true for meditation, exercise and even social activities, unless it’s part of a routine that I’ve already established.
A couple of months ago I told myself that I wanted to start a blog. The truth is, it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. With good intention, I added an item to my task list. Just a first draft. I purposely kept the bar low so that I’d have no excuses.
Week after week, the task just sat there, unmoved. You might assume I was just procrastinating. Indeed, I’ve heard that writing can be painfully difficult to do regularly even for professional writers. The thing is, outside of writing, I’ve been extremely productive the past few months. It wasn’t until I started thinking about my impact in other areas that I finally realized what the issue was. I’ve never built a habit around writing. It’s a completely new activity for me. When I sit down to work, I naturally get pulled into programming tasks. I’m as inclined to spontaneously start writing that first draft as I would be to start practicing the cello.
I was comforted by the fact that I’ve been pretty good at building new routines in the past. Just this year I started working out three times per week and I established some “exploration” time on alternating Fridays 1. Neither of these routines were easy to put in place. But what got them off the ground was scheduling time in my calendar for them. In reality, the first couple of Fridays that I set aside for exploration, I fell back into my old routine and worked a full day like any other. Pretty quickly though, I was able to break my old routine and forge a new one.
Here I am about to publish my first blog post. I can confidently admit that the only reason it got finished is that I allocated time for it. The simple takeaway: when I need to establish a new routine, just start by scheduling a recurring block of time in the calendar. Creating a new habit is just as much about breaking an old one.
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Twice per month, instead of “working”, I dive deep into an unexplored topic that is tangential to the project I’m focused on. It serves both as a break from my day-to-day routine as well as an opportunity to learn something new. Quite often these sessions unblock future work and provide me with a plethora of ideas to build on. ↩