One Way To Never Break A Routine

Routines can be a great way to help achieve things that take time and effort, like a new level of fitness or a product that will take a long time to create and can be produced through regular, small contributions.

Whenever we start a new routine, we always have a sense of hope. There is a target we are aiming for, a vision of a better place that we will get to if we stick to it.

The trouble is, it takes work. Even with our best intentions, a routine is something we have to do, consistently and without fail for it to be a routine.

We make and break our own routines

Take a daily routine, like doing a small amount of exercise every day. Or even a weekly one.

The most common cause of a routine like this breaking is missing just one day. We miss that one time and think that we've broken the routine, so what's the point now? It's broken - we're going to have to start from scratch again to get it going.

But is a routine really broken by a small thing like this?

The answer is no.

Routines are an artificial creation, they're just in our mind.

We decide what our routine is, how often we're going to do something, how we measure our own success. So you've missed a day, so what? Okay, so it may "feel" like the routine's broken, but it hasn't. It's only one day.

Say you miss three days and pick up again where you left off. It's still the same routine, you've just had a bit of a break. It's not broken, you've not gone back to the beginning at all. It could be that you've not made as much progress as you would have liked, or your fitness has regressed slightly, but don't let that stop your routine - it's all in your mind. Just start where you left off and continue.

If your routine is a personal one, the only person you are really accountable to is you - so it's up to you whether you beat yourself up about it and stop (which doesn't really help anyone), or just pick yourself up and continue (which is surely a more constructive way forwards).

Some people might suggest that this is somehow deluding yourself, but I disagree. We're not denying that we've missed a few days, and we're not saying we're happy about that. What we're saying is that despite missing those days, we are going to continue regardless. We will persist and succeed regardless of setbacks - the routine is not broken, it has been on hold but will continue.

Have you ever broken a good routine and never started it again? Maybe now's the time to pick it back up. It was only on hold, after all...