Routine

I'm attempting to reevaluate how I construct my plans.

Before, I would use vague goals with essentially no consequences, so you can see how that might not work so well. It's an admittedly lazy and stupid way to approach life, and it wastes a lot of time. I would often fall back into simple routines, ones that guaranteed a consistently pleasurable, if a bit boring existence. While this routine has bogged me down in many negative ways, I think it's important for me to recognize my reliance on them, and turn routines into something good.

Rather than do something complicated like schedule every minute of my life, I'm going to try and build on what I've already established. Since routines are how I tend to construct my life whether I realize them or not, I'm going to categorize them into good routines (waking up on time, brushing teeth, having breakfast) and bad routines (wasting time on facebook, video games and tv before accomplishing anything important).

This approach, to many, probably looks like the kind of approach that will lead one to be a workaholic, but for me, having lapsed into a social and professional stagnation requires that I focus my attention away from my own greedy habits and be more conscious of what I'll regret in the future if I don't take action today.

How I determine a good routine and a bad routine is dependent on not just the results, but how worthy the journey through each task is. For example, playing video games provides a pleasurable journey, but offers no measurable real world achievements, and buying a house offers a great achievement, but comes at a price too great to consider. This kind of thinking ought to be pretty much obvious, but it amazes me how often it eludes people, including myself. Bad decisions are made every day by those that ought to know better, and sometimes it helps just to write down what makes sense, reminding us of just how illogical we can be.

Prioritizing my goals like this will hopefully give me better insight into the things I really would like to accomplish. Life has gotten too simple and too easy -- time to mix things up a bit, but keeping everything in the structure of routines will hopefully make the change seem less radical than it is.