The joys of rigid routine
Nov. 17th, 2005 09:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjOne of the hardest things I've had to learn about organizing my life is that I'm not much good at simply doing things I ought to do when I ought to do them because I ought to do them. I can identify the things I ought to do, and I can do them, but if I have to make the active decision to do them at the time they need to be done, I'm likely to do something else. The secret has always been designing the mental judo such that making the decision is separate from the action itself.
Take exercise. There have been any number of times when I've started up an exercise program, but then something gets me off schedule, or life gets busy, and at the moment when I decide either to exercise or do something else, the something else wins. What has worked is to tie it so closely into my daily schedule that I no more think about whether to exercise than I think about whether to wake up and get dressed. Ok, and it helps to pay for a gym membership, because then I can't stand not to be getting my money's worth.
And then there's the joy of massive over-analysis and organization of work.
I'd been promising myself since before the dissertation was finished that, when it was done, I'd put out a massive effort to get my house entirely in order. And once it was all in order, all at the same time, it would be a breeze to maintain everything after that. Well, except that the initial "getting everything in order" was such a massively daunting task that it never actually happened. And with clutter all over the place, there wasn't much pressure to keep the clutter clean. I already knew the lesson about engineering habits into my daily schedule, so I had this notion that if I could insert some small amount of housekeeping into my daily schedule, I could actually make it work. But what to do? Where to start and where to stop?
This time the trick ended up being allowing myself the fun of doing a massively over-detailed analysis of all the household tasks, coded by room, desired frequency, cleaning equipment, and balanced out by estimated amount of work, sorted into a rotating 8-week schedule (Mon-Fri only) with no more than 15-20 minutes worth of work on any given day. And the retroactive "payment" for being allowed to do the analysis was to actually perform it. Ok, my mind works in mysterious ways, but whatever works. And it seems to be working, since I'm nearing the conclusion of the second 8-week cycle without any falling off. The schedule is the key: on any given day, I not only don't have to make any decisions about what work I'm doing, I don't even have to think about it … because I've got a check-list that tells me what to do.
Separate the decision making from the execution and somehow it all falls into place. My head must be a peculiar place.
Take exercise. There have been any number of times when I've started up an exercise program, but then something gets me off schedule, or life gets busy, and at the moment when I decide either to exercise or do something else, the something else wins. What has worked is to tie it so closely into my daily schedule that I no more think about whether to exercise than I think about whether to wake up and get dressed. Ok, and it helps to pay for a gym membership, because then I can't stand not to be getting my money's worth.
And then there's the joy of massive over-analysis and organization of work.
I'd been promising myself since before the dissertation was finished that, when it was done, I'd put out a massive effort to get my house entirely in order. And once it was all in order, all at the same time, it would be a breeze to maintain everything after that. Well, except that the initial "getting everything in order" was such a massively daunting task that it never actually happened. And with clutter all over the place, there wasn't much pressure to keep the clutter clean. I already knew the lesson about engineering habits into my daily schedule, so I had this notion that if I could insert some small amount of housekeeping into my daily schedule, I could actually make it work. But what to do? Where to start and where to stop?
This time the trick ended up being allowing myself the fun of doing a massively over-detailed analysis of all the household tasks, coded by room, desired frequency, cleaning equipment, and balanced out by estimated amount of work, sorted into a rotating 8-week schedule (Mon-Fri only) with no more than 15-20 minutes worth of work on any given day. And the retroactive "payment" for being allowed to do the analysis was to actually perform it. Ok, my mind works in mysterious ways, but whatever works. And it seems to be working, since I'm nearing the conclusion of the second 8-week cycle without any falling off. The schedule is the key: on any given day, I not only don't have to make any decisions about what work I'm doing, I don't even have to think about it … because I've got a check-list that tells me what to do.
Separate the decision making from the execution and somehow it all falls into place. My head must be a peculiar place.
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Nope, that's pretty common.
Date: 2005-11-18 05:56 pm (UTC)The joke that encapsulates it is: The hired farm hand would muck out the stables, load the hay into the rick, plow the back forty with a mule, but not sort the potatoes. Why? "Thinkin' is hard. There's always that part of the decision that sez "Beer is good."".
no subject
Date: 2005-11-18 06:05 pm (UTC)One of the things that I frequently noted, when I was doing home health care, is that the best way to ensure that my patients did their exercises was to try to incorporate them into their daily activites (eg. use weak arm as part of hanging clothes on the line; rock the baby in such a way as to strengthen the wrists). That being said, I suspect that you're not so unusual in that aspect, after all :)