Boost Productivity with Routines
Methodologies,  Productivity

Boost Productivity With Routines

Pop quiz:
Are routines:
1) the resort of boring, unimaginative people? or
2) the staple of productive people?

If you picked 1, you need to rethink your take on routines. Because the answer is 2.

Routines Are Not Stifling

Before we start talking about routines in detail, I want to make sure that you know that routines are not stifling. And in order to understand why, you need to understand the basics of decision fatigue.

Decision fatigue means that we can only make so many decisions before the effort starts to wear on us. After making many decisions, we start to just pick the defaults.

So why waste your precious decision-making capability and discernment on things that don’t need it?

Why Routines? Why Not Simpler Choices?

Decision fatigue isn’t impacted by the toughness of the decision. You could be deciding which shoe to put on first, or deciding who wins the full-ride scholarship. To your ego, it’s all the same level of decision.

Routines take some of those decisions away. You make the decision once on what you are going to do, and you follow it on subsequent days, without repeating those decisions.

Morning And Evening

The two types of routines I am talking about this month are morning and evening routines.

There have been lots of articles and books out there about the value of a morning routine, and how every last person who has every made a bajillion dollars has a strict morning routine.

I’m not here to contradict it. Although I will throw in that just having a morning routine isn’t going to be all you need to be the next Warren Buffett. Just saying.

In addition, though, we need to consider the evening routine as well. Why? Because even though we are at the end of our decision making capabilities by the time we are ready for bed, we can still use a routine to make decisions to make the morning flow much faster.

An Example

One of the things we do in the morning is get dressed. (I hope) That should be part of the morning routine. Getting dressed sets the stage for a lot of things, even if you are working from home.

(A great article for some empirical evidence of this can be found at How Getting Dressed Can TOTALLY Change Your LIFE!)

However…the decision of what to wear can be time-consuming and difficult, particularly if you are not fully awake, you overslept, or you have children screaming at you from every corner of the house. Or all of the above.

So rather than force yourself to make that decision under those circumstances, or to put clothes on only to find that you have to change because of missing buttons/broken zippers/wrinkles/runs/spots/stains/whatever, do that as part of your evening routine. Make the decision at night, and do the inspection of the clothes then. In the morning you just need to put them on.

How Do Routines Boost Productivity?

At their very basic implementation, routines will boost your productivity just by keeping some decisions off your radar.

But they also can have a bigger impact…
…if you are not taking the time to make routine decisions, you have more time to work on stuff that matters.
…if you are not thinking through the process each time, you are doing necessary activities more efficiently than reasoning through each time.
…if you are building things into your routines that allow you to expand your horizons, you will learn more and be exposed to more ideas that can boost your productivity as well.

Image by Impact Hub. Licensed under Creative Commons. Text added.