How to have a proactive routine?
Muse #451 - are you in control of it?
I wrote a couple of days ago that the universe might be dictating my routine. If that is indeed true, then how come can one have some degree of control over it? Here are some possible thoughts…
Proactiveness - list all the items on your routine. Look at the items that you get to proactively vs the ones you are forced to do reactively. One way is to figure out how more items can be done on that list proactively than reactively.
Internal motivation - The stuff for which you have internal motivation to do instead of external motivation leads to more proactiveness. Find out techniques that allow you to be internally motivated in your routine. The more you want it badly, the easier it becomes to start and therefore finish.
Eliminate - how can one eliminate items on your routine. If you don’t want to do it if you don’t care to do it, is there any way not to have it at all?
Micro routines - there are lots of items that can be split into small tiny pieces so that they can be incorporated into a day with a little extra effort so don’t have to be part of the routine at all. Like I unload part of the dishes from the dishwasher while I make my morning coffee. By the time I make my second Keurig coffee, the rest of the dishwasher is unloaded, so it is not a task at all.
Game it - the previous point extends to doing things in the routine that can be gamed - Gamify your routine or its measures so that there is a way to meet the goals. For example, trying to meet 10,000 steps a day on a tracker.
Obsess it - Obsessing about something might make you want to figure out answers to do something better or improve ways to do something. I use obsession as a tool in some parts of my life to make things proactive and internally motivated. Though, I have not figured out how to carry this over to the rest of all of my life.
Learn to enjoy it - Reframing one’s viewpoint and how we look at things by learning to enjoy the mundane things in one’s routine, makes our routine effortless and better. Though it seems plausible, it might take hard work to reframe and relook at things from a totally different perspective.
These are among the several techniques that I use to attempt to snatch the routine back from the universe. What are yours?