When I was younger, I thought the ideal schedule was no schedule at all. I was happy to drift around the neighborhood living completely in the moment, just going from whim to whim. I might roll up onto a friend’s porch, just to see what they were up to: “Oh, you are looking for a someone to play chess, I’m in! Swimming down at the river? bong rips and tv? Sure!” This is an excusable way to live in your 20’s. But it can’t persist much longer than that, unless you have very rich parents or you don’t mind being homeless.
Total spontaneity does have its benefits, but it is no way to live day after day. Creative freedom and spontaneity is even more powerful when it is the icing on the cake of a solid routine. The trick is to find that Goldilocks balance of routine that allows for creative spontaneity. This is the paradox—the stronger your habits and routines are, the more you can afford creative spontaneity. Let’s take a look at why that is.
The First Benefit: Hard Stuff Becomes Easy
The truth is that unless you are very gifted at finding fun and interesting things to go do, your spontaneously chosen activities will tend to gravitate towards the lowest denominator, i.e.— the bong rips and tv option. This is why a routine is so useful. When you find that you have spent a given hour of the day well you can freeze it by making the commitment to repeat it daily or weekly. Any change that you make to your routine will be hard for about the first two weeks, then it will get easier and easier until it becomes automatic. You want to start a daily meditation routine? It’s hard for a couple weeks then eventually becomes automatic. Want to make of habit of practicing a language you are learning, spending an hour a day writing, start a new exercise habit, clean your home, cook a healthy dinner, spend some time reading a book, etc. Any new change takes effort for a couple of weeks and then becomes 80%-90% automatic.
Notice I didn’t say it becomes 100% percent automatic. It still takes a little bit of effort to make yourself do the useful thing, rather than lay on the couch eating Doritos, watching Netflix, while scrolling on your phone, or whatever the lowest common denominator is for you. It still takes a little bit of effort to maintain a good habit.
A good example of this is what time you wake up. Say you want to wake up an hour earlier. The first time your alarm goes off an hour early you will have to use every ounce of your willpower to force yourself to pry open your eyes and roll out of bed. The next day it will be 10% easier (assuming you are also adjusting your bedtime hour.) And then easier the next day, until eventually that hour earlier feels like the normal hour and it doesn’t require any extra effort.
You can apply this principle to anything at all, any new endeavor, in fact that is what a habit is; it is a difficult thing that we have made easy for ourselves by repetition. If you put in enough reps you can do things that the average person would find impossible, like learning Korean or making a salad to go with dinner.
This is a simple truth that gym rats understand. Lift heavy object. Repeat until heavy object no feel heavy. Anything that we do frequently we adapt to. Our biceps can adapt to lifting heavy barbells over our heads. Our bodies say, “well, I don’t know why the boss wants me to lift this heavy object a bunch of times in a row, but I guess this is what we are doing now. So I’d, better adapt!” And then your body physically changes over time until lifting that same exact object can be done easy-peasy.
Building a routine means understanding that it is not just our muscles that will grow, expand and become stronger, it is everything. You could imagine that you have a muscle for any given activity: waking up at 7 am, playing the piano, eating vegetables, practicing Spanish, learning to code, or learning how to dance tango. The muscle for that thing becomes bigger with each time you do it and the activity becomes easier. If you get really great at any difficult activity you can probably make a living doing it.
So, the first benefit of a routine is to make something difficult become easy through repetition. The thing that you repeat is called a habit. The frequency that you repeat the habit is the routine, it could be daily, it could be three times a week, or weekly, or whatever. There are the habits you do every single day, brushing your teeth is one of them (hopefully). Then there are also routines for habits that are on different days of the week. For example, I try to get some cardio exercise 3 times a week. When I fall out of the habit it becomes hard to get started again. Or another example I try to sit down and write every weekday morning. Whenever I get off my schedule it’s a huge effort to get rolling again, at first it feels like a life-or-death struggle, like Rambo vs. Godzilla in a cage fight to the death. But I know that if I stick with it for a couple weeks, it will become close to automatic. It never becomes completely 100% automatic, there is always a small part of me that wants to be lazy, that is just human nature.
The Second Benefit: Time is Leverage
The second benefit of routine is that it uses time as a fulcrum to accomplish incredible feats. There is something about how we humans perceive time that makes it so that we tend to over estimate how much we can get done in a day but we underestimate how much we can accomplish over a long period of time.
You can see this with anything, Let’s take learning how to play guitar as an example. If you sit down and play your heart out and study as hard as you can for hours—just for one day— you will only make a minuscule improvement in your guitar shredding ability. But no matter how hard you try, you can’t master the guitar in one day. On the other hand if you commit to practicing an hour a day, it will never feel grueling. An hour a day of practice is enough to learn a little bit and progress day by day and as the weeks turn into months an hour a day will put you in the upper 5 percentile of just about any activity—whether that is learning to play chess, or guitar, or writing, or making nice hardwood furniture.
Some people never understand this. My neighbor heard me playing guitar, and told me “I always wanted to learn how to play guitar. I took lessons when I was a kid, but when they told me I had to learn scales, I was like hell no, I don’t want to learn scales, I just want to shred!”
“But you have to learn scales before you can shred,” I told him.
“Nah man, I don’t have time for boring stuff like scales. I just want to skip to the shredding!”
“Um, ok,” I said. What my neighbor didn’t realize is that shredding is actually just the boring part—scales—played really fast and loud.
Musicians and athletes understand the power of routine. A committed runner will do everything they can to not miss a workout, the swimmer, the runner, the cyclist, even a golfer understands that a competition it is not won by any one workout, but by ongoing long-term commitment.
The Third Benefit: Inspiration requires playing the long game
The third benefit of routine is it will keep you going until inspiration arrives.
Your commitment to habit will sustain you on the days when it is easy and the days when it is hard. I’ll talk about writing as an example—because that is my go-to mode of creativity, but the idea applies equally to all pursuits and endeavors. When I am in the groove and the writing is going well, that morning commitment to writing the same amount of pages, day in, day out, flies by and before I kill off my second cup of coffee, I’m stacking up my pages for the day in a neat pile and heading out for an afternoon bike ride as happy as a chipmunk in a peanut warehouse. Then there are the days when it’s a slog, when the act of sitting down to write feels about as fun as chewing a handful of sand. Those are the days you really got to lean on your routine.
Society mythologizes creators and makes us think we can only create when we feel like it. As though inspiration shows up and whispers in your ear, and until then you can lay on the couch surfing the internet. Nope. The point of a routine is you hit it at the same time, the same length every week. Let’s say you go for a 2-mile run 3 times a week. There are days when that run is going to set you free, and there will also be days when you feel like you’re jogging in quicksand. But if you stick with the routine the days when you fly are going to outnumber the days when you drag more and more. When you have a strong routine——you can afford to take creative risks, to play, because you know you have that strong daily foundation to come back too.