For years now, I’ve obsessed over the idea of a perfect, daily routine. I was driven by the assumption that if I could only develop and execute such a routine then I would finally gain mastery over my productivity. I fantasized I would be able to work towards all of my goals at maximum pace. And I thought conquering the world comes down to simply committing to certain activities at certain times of the day and maintaining the discipline required to do so perpetually.
Sounds a bit brainwash-y, doesn’t it?
However, last month I had an epiphany, born of frustration, that the idea of a daily routine, at least in terms of how it has been popularized by the productivity gurus, is bullshit – and I had fallen for it, hard.
The Fatal Flaws of the Daily Routine
I can say this with confidence because my obsession hasn’t been limited to fantasy – I’ve been experimenting. I’ve designed and implemented many daily routines but ultimately they require so much precision to execute that no manner of heroics can help achieve the consistency I am looking for. However, this isn’t due to a flaw in my designs themselves, but rather due to several flaws in the primary assumptions of the design, imported from the concept of the “daily routine”. These include:
- Not acknowledging the realities of non-negotiable responsibilities that conflict with your desired schedule and location.
- Not acknowledging the variability and unpredictability of daily life or recognizing the natural, structural differences of each type of day.
- Not acknowledging the fixed capacity of the day and how not every objective can be multiplexed to the nth degree. Many activities have minimum duration requirements in order to be productive. If you want a fully inclusive daily routine, then the day is too short of an epoch to design your life around.
Well, What is a Daily Routine?
I love starting with a definition. Interestingly, “daily routine” is a somewhat overloaded term. So, here’s how I interpret “daily routine”:
When the daily routine is not a productivity tool: Classically, the daily routine is something we naturally converge to through months or years of iteration. This notion is dependent on a stable substrate – e.g. consistency in our environment and core responsibilities. For instance, if you changed your primary form of income every few months, or even every year, you may never reach a suitable equilibrium for this “natural” routine to converge.
However, not playing an active part in that convergence can be dangerous. If we don’t take responsibility and manage the events of our days then, the events of the day will ultimately manage us. We may think that we have a daily routine, but in fact, that routine is the day’s routine, not ours.
When the daily routine becomes a meme: In other ways, when people say “daily routine” they mean the series of actions borrowed from the ultra-elite that we strive to emulate because, hey, if it works for them it should work for us, too, right? No doubt they have lots of great things to share and I’ve certainly benefited from many. The trouble is we’re so enamored with the fantasy of a daily routine that we neglect the real, practical differences between our own lifestyles and those we’re borrowing from – namely, style of employment and access to resources. In this context, the idea of a masterful, daily routine unfortunately seems to have been reduced to more of a meme than a genuine productivity strategy.
If we strip the concept of its cultural baggage, I see the daily routine as a multiplexing optimization around a portfolio of objectives and responsibilities where day-to-day consistency and individual control are baked in. While a valid definition, it’s not necessarily a complete or coherent strategy for productivity.
Rooted in Optimization
The daily routine is something we supposedly construct to optimize productivity around a portfolio of objectives (things we chose) and responsibilities (things we may not have chosen). When taken to the limit, the daily routine necessitates that each day be only negligibly different from all other days. It also presumes a degree of personal agency that is highly inconsistent with the constraints of virtually all humans’ lives.
The question then becomes: if we value optimization, which we seemingly do, then how can we assume that a consistent, daily routine is the optimal way to operate in a world of such variety and uncertainty? You wouldn’t presume to use the same daily routine for a weekend as you use for a weekday because they are fundamentally different classes of days. And under the constraints of the “real world”, I find most days to be substantially different from one another. Put simply, the rigidity of the ideal implementation of a daily routine is becomes brittle with exposed to the realities of daily life.
A Better Way
I (we) need a better model to think about organizing our daily lives. Fortunately, my epiphany wasn’t only a critique – it came with a solution, too. Two clear ideas emerged and I’ve immediately put them both into practice. As a result, I have not only reduced my anxiety about not living up to the impossible standards of the daily routine but have also made myself more productive without making myself busier. They are:
The Minimum Daily Routine (MDR) – A reimagining of the daily routine as the minimum set of activities that you must do everyday, but nothing else. Non essential habits can be added, but minimization is expressly valued.
The Standard Weekly Epoch – A shift to organizing daily life around the epoch of the week instead of the day. This minimizes the complexity of the daily model and exploits the structural differences between each type of day.
I have benefited from both of these concepts and, as you can see, they are actually interrelated. Let’s see if I can explain.
Class Inheritance of Days
I find it helpful to use an OOP inheritance analogy to explain both the utility of a Minimum Daily Routine and a Standard Weekly Epoch. It’s as simple as not all days are the same but all days have somethings in common. Therefore, there is necessarily a base class:
class Day :: SmallestNaturalEpoch { };
Commonalities emerge at the next level up, too. Each day of the week maintains its own common, archetypal characteristics – some the same for everyone, and some unique to the individual.
class Sunday :: Day { };
class KevinSunday :: Sunday { };
And from here, it’s an easy leap to exploit the natural structures of these various days to cast them as special purpose days.
class GymDay :: KevinFriday, KevinSunday, KevinMonday { };
My Real World Examples
I’m going to be bold and use myself as an example rather than boiling the ocean for the infinite combination of schedules out there. For me, there are minimally three different kinds of days on a given (normal) week and four types when we look at the bi-weekly cycle (I work what we call a Flex schedule). Each week there are three in-the-office work days (Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday). Each week there are two weekend days (Saturday and Sunday). Every other week there are two work-from-home days (Monday and every other Friday) and one non-working weekday (every other Friday). Essentially, some days I work and some days I don’t. Some days I work from the office and some days I work from home. Some days are flexible giving me a lot of control and some days are not. Some days I’m off from work while my wife is working. Other days we’re in sync.
Even with this extremely rudimentary differentiation, it’s clear that the optimal solution (i.e. the “routine”) for each of those days is going to be radically different. Each would require a completely different daily routine, particularly if I wanted to optimize the hell out of my schedule.
The Minimum Daily Routine
Therefore, the Minimum Daily Routine is equivalent to the base class implementation of Day. Essentially, what’s common amongst all days. Some daily habits are inescapable – at least they are inescapable to the point of grave consequence if left unserved. Everyday I go to sleep and I wake up. Every day I perform several hygiene tasks. Everyday I dress myself. Then, there are also activities, like drinking tea with my wife in the morning, that while at my discretion are so consistent a habit that they become part of my MDR.
On the surface, this may seem rudimentary to the point of this being a trivial observation and useless definition. So, why is it actually useful?
I believe there are three reasons.
First, it’s a simplification. The lower the volume and complexity of the series of tasks that you perform each day the higher the likelihood of consistency and compliance over a long period of time and the easier it is to hold in your head, reflect on, make changes to, and optimize for.
Second, because of the simplicity and consistency, it makes for an optimal foundation to build additional habits and behaviors around. For instance, while medication habits often have daily variation, they are the stickiest when attached to the most fundamental parts of our routines.
Third, because the Minimum Daily Routine expresses a value as a functional objective. The more than we can minimize the volume and complexity of the daily routine, the more effective it becomes. Obviously, it has to grow beyond the rudimentary to be useful. But if it grows out of control, then habits break down and it becomes useless. What I perceive is that above a certain volume and complexity, it begins to make sense to attach behaviors to weekly anchors than daily ones thereby co-optimizing the complexity of our daily and weekly models with our overall productivity.
The Standard Weekly Epoch
Its an easy logical leap to say: if the day is too short of an epoch to organize my life, then why not the next longest natural epoch? As far as I see it, there are only three truly natural (relevant) epochs. The day follows the earths rotation. The month approximates the lunar cycle. And the year follows the earths revolution around the sun. However, my intuition says that a month is too long of an epoch to organize habits around – at that length, it’s more of a planning function. So, we need something between day and month. We’ll have to settle for the artificial epoch of the week.
Perhaps we can debate whether or not the week is an artificial epoch or not. However, the significance of using such an epoch is two-fold. First, our biologies and psychologies have evolved around them. This is more true for the natural epochs. Second, virtually everyone honors them which enables you to actually build a reliable schedule around them. It’s really this second reason that I hope to exploit. As a counter example, the universities honor the semester as an epoch while the rest of the world doesn’t. While at the university, you can design your life around semesters. When not at the university, you cannot.
While the week appears to be a fiction not based on any natural cycle, the entire world does seem to agree on what a week is and how to follow it. Everyone agreeing to organize their life around an idea is an important prerequisite. This is what yields the common class definitions of days of the week and makes optimizing around the week logical.
When Exercise Becomes Trivial
I have over a half-dozen examples of activities whose schedules I have been able to refactor around a weekly framework. But in the interest of keeping my word count as close to 2000 as possible, I’ll limit my conclusion to a single example. Fortunately, I have the perfect one to illustrate the utility of weekly scheduling – my current gym habits. In fact, it was the evolution of my gym habits that became the primary observation that led me to a different way of thinking.
Previously, when driven by the desire for the perfect daily routine, I became obsessive about wanting to go to the gym everyday. A noble goal for sure. However, the realities of overtraining aside, this was an impossible standard to achieve for many reasons.
Under my new framework, I only go to the gym twice per week. Yet each week I enjoy meaningful progress in my performance, functional mobility, and how my body looks and feels. Remarkably, I can achieve this with virtually zero disruption to any other aspect of my life. Here’s how:
First, I conceded that I wouldn’t workout on in-the-office days (T, W, Th). That left 4 days that I can feasibly make it to the gym. Second, I constrained my expected workouts per week to two days: a Push + Legs day and a Pull + Legs day (I split my leg workout between the two sessions). This way, I still have a day for yard work and house chores and another day for backup. Structured this way, my compliance has been virtually 100%. Rather than stressing about not working out enough, I look forward to the exercise.
Furthermore, the total time requirement per week is a paltry 5 hours. This means I can make meaningful progress on this dimension of my life without it defining my life and compromising the myriad of other fun games I want to play. I’m still kind of shocked that this simply change in mental models has resulted in me finally firing on all cylinders while simultaneously enjoying a lower stress lifestyle. Pretty crazy, right?
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