It’s a humbling feeling. One day, you have it all together: your 7am yoga routine, your perfectly calibrated to-do list, your soundness of mind and body. And then something happens. Not anything serious like a freak tornado or assassination attempt, but something smaller, like a trip or a few days out with COVID-19. This seemingly minor event then derails your perfect plan, your entire life, and you’re back into the pit you had to crawl your way out of six months ago.
It could happen to anyone. If you’re wondering why there hasn’t been a blog post in a few weeks, you now have your answer (but for the record, I haven’t done 7am yoga since college). “Life”, as Ian Malcom said, “finds a way.” Jeff Goldblum’s character was talking about chaos theory and dinosaurs running amok, and I’m simply whining about my recent lapse in productivity.
Jurassic Park the novel goes way more into chaos theory than the film adaptation. I became interested in the subject and used it to explain everything around me. Things tend towards disorder, or what the physics nerds call “entropy”: you never have to work to dirty your room, for example, only to clean it. Similarly, if you don’t prioritize the important things, life will just take over. Weeks or months could even go by while your highest hopes gather dust in the attic, where you moved them to make room for activities that only provide you short-term happiness.
You’ve heard it a million times from those self-help authors and podcasters getting rich of recycling buddhist ideas: routine is important. I cannot exaggerate the importance of having an anchor, any sort of anchor, in a world where the only consistent thing is change. It gives you something constant to hold onto. It’s easy to use traveling or being sick as an excuse for not getting your stuff done. A routine, even a simple, fun one, can be the glue that holds you accountable to the better version of yourself. Surprisingly, I learned this from yoga. Forcing yourself into physical instability necessitates that you create your own stability from within. Or fall on your face.
Granted, most of your days will probably look similar. Unless you’re a firefighter or park ranger, there won’t be flames, smoke and chaos. But a routine will give you something to hold onto when things happen. And they will happen.
After my most recent wagon-falling, I thought about how to make the impact hurt a little less next time. Here’s three steps I’ll take every workday to do my best to keep myself on track:
- Sketch out a rough plan for the week
- Block out free and work hours for the day. Assign tasks for work hours. Don’t assign more than 2-3 tasks per day
- Evaluate productivity at end of each day (15 mins) and each week (30 mins)
It may seem high-maintenance, but time is the most valuable thing we have: we can never get it back. It’s important to be protective of it.
This Week’s Top 3
- All Time Low’s cover of “Blinding Lights” 🎸 – Already a 10/10 song. 10/10 band. 11/10 punk rock cover
- The Sanatorium 📖 – Good vacation read—never a dull moment. Honorable mention for One of Us is Lying for writing that does The CW better than The CW
- My article on social media subcultures 👩🏾💻 – Part of the reason I fell off the wagon with this blog was writing this. I’m proud of it (“Is it tacky to self-promote on your own blog?”, she wondered)