If you make a positive activity a routine, and you do the activity properly every time, then you’re pretty much guaranteed to succeed at whatever endeavour it is that the activity contributes to.
Say you want to become a grade five piano player. If you make practicing on the piano for one hour every day a routine then you will become a grade five piano player, and you’ll do it faster than most.
That’s the value, the beauty, of a routine: it’s a guarantee that you’ll get somewhere with any activity that has a long-term cumulative effect.
Creating a routine
To set up a daily routine you will need:
Activity you can do every day x 1
Day x 5
Do the activity for five days in a row and on the sixth day you’ll do it without making much effort – because you did it for the last five. Voila, you have a routine!
It may take a larger number of days before your activity becomes a routine for you, but it shouldn’t take any more than a month. Once you’ve made one all you have to do is follow it to your goal.
A weekly routine is almost the same thing: just change days for weeks. For a monthly routine, substitute in months.
Make it sustainable
Excrement happens. There could be days when it will be impossible to follow the routine: even the most dedicated joggers don’t tend to run for a while if their legs get broken. There are other days that could arise when following your routine would be an overall bad thing to do – such as if your wife goes into labour but you insist on going for your two hour run anyway.
A routine will get stronger (by which I mean easier to follow) as you keep to it for longer and longer but when you break it – whether you’ve been doing it for a week or a season – it can die if you don’t fix it fast.
Create a routine that, taking your life into consideration, you’re confident you’d only need to break for a day or two should any dire events come up. This will probably mean just limiting it to some activity that you can start and finish within an hour or two.
Troubleshooting
To make an activity a routine you must get over any negative emotions that you attach to doing the activity, such as boredom and your own perceived laziness. To do that you use the Inclination Methods.
Once positive actions become routine you’ll do them automatically and you’ll need the IMs far less often than you ordinarily would.
And here’s one I made earlier…
Last year I started on the task of memorising the writings and primary meanings of over two thousand kanji – Chinese characters that constitute one of the three Japanese alphabets.
Any person who does this task will be able to understand all the writing on most Chinese restaurant signs - so it is totally worth doing, people =P
I knew it would be a major step for me towards fluency in Japanese and so, after I’d turned the study of kanji meanings and writings into an activity I could easily do everyday, I made it a routine.
This routine meant spending around two hours on kanji every day of the week and I followed this routine for about three months.
There were a few days in those three months when I didn’t do it because I felt almost unable to, but because this was a sustainable routine I was able to get back into it after those few days.
The end result was fantastic – I covered a huge number of Chinese characters in very little time – and I’ll be discussing it more in a future article.
If you have a clear goal in mind work out the steps you can take each day (or week or month) to achieve it and make those steps a routine.
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