Is your routine serving you well?

Is your routine a comfort or a prison?

Maybe it’s both?

Are there items you do that may be time wasters?

Hmmmmm… Even a routine can hold those time smashers with few rewards.

We all develop routines, even if we don’t mean to… and one set of regular behaviors may work well when we’re parenting children, but they don’t work as well once those children are adults. Sometimes we have habits that are left over from other life experiences…

Sometimes we do things because we’ve always done them. There are times when unhealthy habits creep into our days . And even if those actions are not hurting us, perhaps they don’t make the impact we would really want longterm.

What would you remove from your routine?

What would you remove from your routine if you could?

Let’s say that you have something you do every day or week, and it isn’t helpful. Or maybe you’re not good at it… Could another person help with that item on your list of “to-do’s”?

I have a personal example. Rob and I have been married 38 years. All these years I’ve enjoyed doing laundry. Yup. I’m odd. Even when we had loads of laundry we called “Mount Never Rest” and I had to go down into an unfurnished, unheated basement in Canadian winters, laundry was a chore I embraced in my routine.

Why? I could quickly take what was messy and make it clean and organized. Bada boom – bada bing!

However… all those beautifully clean and folded loads of laundry somehow rarely made it from the basket to the drawers or closets. Oh, yes. That’s where the routine of laundry broke down.

We didn’t find a solution until we were married for 30+ years!

That was when we were traveling full-time in our RV, doing laundry in laundromats, and Rob, having dealt with the issue of often finding his clothes in a laundry basket and not the drawers, took over putting the clean laundry away. I still happily did the washing and folding but he finished the job. He loves to finish things! It’s his strength.

We now have a routine that serves us both. I was no longer a prisoner of my laundry basket! I no longer need to feel like a failure because the routine wasn’t healthy. Ha!

So, there are times when what we’re doing may need a refresh – another set of hands, or even hiring someone to take over where it makes sense financially and relationally.

What other reasons would a routine not serve you well? Consider…

A routine can either serve you or waste your time.

Maybe that’s a harsh statement.

Perhaps.

But as many statements go, there’s a little truth there. Maybe.

What are you doing that is a waste of your time? Ponder a bit – how does your day go? They euphemistically can be called “time-sucks”. Checking email or social media instead of completing something? Reading or streaming a few more shows or sports than you’d want admit to? Excessively exercising, working out or playing video games instead of investing time with family, on the pretext of “I need me time.”

Why is this important?

We all have a finite number of days – we need to use them well!

I was listening to a podcast and the fellow proposed an interesting concept. Take the number of days in the number of years most people live – maybe it’s 90 years, or 80 or… (if we said 80 years that would equal 29,200 days.) Now, take the number of days you already have lived, and subtract it from that number.

29,000 days – your days = ?how many days you have to use well!

This idea isn’t meant to scare you, or make you feel depressed… but, if you’re at all like me, the number you come up with is less than you’d imagined. And that feeling is important!

And we have no idea how or when our days are complete. But this is just a “what if” scenario…

Which brings me back to the initial question…

If there was one thing from your routine that you could eliminate, what would it be?

Don’t let your routine activities become a prison just because you haven’t thought them through in the last while.

Review what you do each day and ask yourself,

“If I have 7280 days to spend, how would I invest those well?“

Just for fun, do the math and leave a comment on how many days (imagining a life of 80 years) you have to use well… maybe even share what you could eliminate in your day-to-day unconscious routines to use those days in better ways!

If you’re a journaling kind of person, use this question in your journal – or download a sheet I’ve created for you to doodle/color on with the question…. And if you’re a “junk journaler” and want to make something, I’ve also created a PDF to download – download the images here.

Follow me on YouTube!

you can see me making the tag with the questions on my YouTube channel – https://youtu.be/fdu2F0wKnOs

Is your routine serving you well?