Each day, each of us is looking for simple hacks to success. What is the one little thing that we can change which would make our lives enormously better?
A simple answer to that question is routines. The more routines we include in our lives, easier becomes the process of living, setting us up for success.
Here are 5 reasons why routines are important and how they contribute to your success.
- Routines Eliminate the Need to Think and thus Save Time
Brushing your teeth is routine. Washing our hands has become routine. The activities we associate with routine are activities we do without thinking. Thinking takes up time.
Imagine if you were to wake up each day and spend 10 minutes thinking whether you have to brush today or no! That’s unimaginable, right? This is because we have been in this routine since we were young and it’s a part of us now. So we brush our teeth without thinking and thus save time!
Likewise, if we create routines for our regular tasks, we eliminate thinking time and thus save time that we can use for productive purposes.
Something as simple as your attire for the day (or the week) can be crafted into a routine. Your breakfast routines can be set up. With routines, you save an enormous amount of time on mundane things.Here are some highly successful people who have the same ideas.
2. Routines Help Create the Right Behavior To Achieve Our Goals
When we set up routines for actions that lead to our important goals, we are setting ourselves up for success. For example, for a physical fitness goal, set up a routine to walk for 1 hour everyday. Thus the routine helps create a behavior for walking everyday. And sure enough the results come through.
Let us consider another goal -money saving. Set up a routine that you’ll track your expenses at the end of each day, just before you go to bed. The routine helps create a behavior to track your expenses. As a result, this helps to make better decisions about spending habits, leading to greater savings.
3. Routines Build Consistency
Consistency is the key to success. Success is never the result of an overnight transformation. One of my favorite quotes is “Success isn’t revolutionary, it is evolutionary”. As James Clear says in his hugely successful book Atomic Habits, it’s the small changes in your routine, carried out consistently that provide you the BIG results.
When you have a routine, habits are formed, because it is effortless to follow routines. Habits build consistency.
And consistency is the precursor to transformation and change.
4. Routines Reduce Efforts
When something becomes a routine, there is a sense of automation to it. The effort required for that activity goes down significantly. For instance, if you create a routine of writing in journal, for 5 minutes before bed time everyday, you just do it. You don’t have to think about the activity- what to do, how to do, where is my journal whether to do it or not.
Decision making fatigues our brain. When we make decisions (small or big), we are utilizing valuable resources. When we routinize certain actions of our day, we are freeing up our brain resources to be available for the key decisions that really need all the resources they can get. Thus our exhaustion level also goes down.
5. Routines can be Customised
A common complaint against routines is that routines make life boring. That is not true. You can have fun with the routines you create for yourself. Customize your routines as you see fit. Link your routines to one another. For instance I have a routine to have a glass of warm water as soon I wake up. You could create a routine to listen to a podcast on your commute. The options are endless.You can customize and have fun with routines. And along the way, get closer to achieving your goals.
What routines do you already have in place? And what routines would you like to start?
howfarhownear 