3 Ways to Rework Your Routine If It’s Not Working For You

Sarah Thomas
4 min readFeb 28, 2020
Photo by THE 5TH on Unsplash

On an average day, I wake up before the sun rises. I have ample time to get dressed, drink a glass of water and brew my coffee. I write past daybreak without distraction and work diligently on the to-do list that I prepared the night before when I went to bed at 10 pm. What about you?

Bah! I wish! And I do wish I had this kind of day, just once a month would do, but the reality is that my day is full of distractions, some self-imposed, others not, others arguable. My evening passes by quickly, and the distractions fly in by 10 pm, I am as close to feeling like bedtime as I am to finishing that to-do list. Nowhere near.

I have had these kinds of days, and they are possible but always at the expense of something else. “Success” a diligent routine-meister would say, but there’s gotta be another way. The opportunity cost of this perfect day for me could be a last-minute inspiration dash on a story; it could be an evening out with friends, a cinema date, it could be a client deadline, it could be life.

I get it, I do, 10,000 hours and all that. I understand that an unshakeable routine is at good accumulating those hours and progress, but I’m a flawed human being and prone to distraction. Pretending otherwise is the least productive option.

Even within a routine success is not guaranteed. Writers, freelancers, humans I know you’ve had a bad, uninspired day and there’s nothing to be gained within those walls of your regime. Isn’t sticking doggedly to a routine putting a process ahead of the product?

Ergo, I’m experimenting out loud with alternatives to a strict routine. I have my schedule, my plans for mass domination and my to-do list but I’m ditching the rest.

Below are a couple of things I’m trying out.

The OODA Loop

This strategy was created by the US Air Force Colonel John Boyd, and it is a process for quick but effective decision making. How will it work in this context? You keep your schedule but not lock in routine at the expense of everything else. You make quick decisions on incoming attention attacks with this process.

Observe — What’s coming in? A massive award for your work? That’s going to be hard to ignore.

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Sarah Thomas

Storyteller, ex playwright (produced), award winning screenwriter, always writing. Creating story-based content for businesses. Based in Aberdeen.