Routines, Rituals and Schedules

For the past several years when I've felt that I haven't been making progress towards my most important goals, I've blamed it largely on my tendency to designate time more to the tune of "external" pressures (work demands, friends' requests, family obligations) than internal ones (in this case, referring to my ideal long-term aspirations). Further, I thought this tendency had a pretty logical basis, the external pressures tended have a certain time urgency; whereas, the steps to take towards long-term goals could always be deferred. To the extent I was making decisions about how to spend time on a moment-to-moment basis, those more timely external demands would always trump the long-term goals, which may have a had a higher priority overall but were never punctuated by urgency.

So the solution, I thought, must be to stop making decisions about how to spend my time always in the moment. I needed to make allocations in a more reflective mode that could plan longer-term strategies. I needed a schedule.

Since then I've had a faith that just creating the right schedule and sticking to it would be the answer to all these woes. But I have yet to create a schedule that's really caught on for me. I've tried different techniques, from low-intensity to-do lists to more elaborate hour-by-hour scheduling with the aid of a palm pilot (given to me by my pal Bobby). Failure after failure. This weekend I made another attempt and realized just how incapable I was of estimating how long certain tasks would take, and more damning to the scheduling enterprise, I realize by now that it is not time but energy that matters most to productivity, something a linear schedule cannot capture. But I am trying a new technique - creating rituals. My first scheduled ritual: spending a half hour Monday and Friday mornings on this blog.