Crazy Little Routines

Our little bungalow has three entries. The front door normally gets opened five times a week to check the mailbox. If readers stop by to purchase one of my books, I generally steer them to the front door as well.

The back door off the kitchen, leading to a mid-size deck, was not part of the original house but makes a nice addition. Normally, it’s used only in the summer months.

Our most-used entry.

The side door is the one we usually use. It utilizes one of those arrangements common to homes built in the 1960s. You enter, stand on a three-by-four-foot landing to hang your coat, leave your boots, and then choose between three steps up to the kitchen or nine steps down to the basement. Not a problem in the summer months. But in winter, or when company comes, it’s a nightmare for everyone to unboot themselves without booting anyone else down the stairs. I don’t know how families managed with these cattle chutes back in the day. Still, it generally works fine for the two of us.

Thanksgiving weekend, the handle on our side storm door broke. Hubby took the handle to the hardware store where we’d purchased the door, only to learn it would take six to eight weeks to get a replacement handle. This left us with no way to latch the storm door. Since we were leaving on a trip, Hubby threaded a plastic zip tie through the hole and tied the door shut. With that entrance out of commission, we needed to develop some new habits. Switching to the front and back doors was not a major inconvenience. At first.

Then winter blew in.

Suddenly, coat hooks, closets, and boot trays were in the wrong spots. The corner stand where we collect items to be grabbed on our way out the door now stood in an inconvenient place. Turning off a light on your way out the back door required traipsing across the kitchen floor in your boots. I couldn’t sit at my usual place at the table without moving footwear. Instead of one small rug accumulating dirt, snow, and gravel, we had three. Every time I left the house, I seemed to be gathering items from all over. I didn’t know how to go anywhere anymore.

How can such a small change throw our whole routine into confusion?

John Dryden, an English literary critic and playwright of the 1600s, said, “We first make our habits, and then our habits make us.” We humans are creatures of habit and the older we grow, the more attached we become to our routines. We resist new tricks, even when those tricks could improve our lives or even save them.

Sometimes we need a little shakeup to keep our brains sharp or to experience new adventures. If I hadn’t been forced to use alternate doors, I wouldn’t have found the house key I thought I’d lost. I wouldn’t have discovered the cute bunny living in our shrub. I wouldn’t have realized that taking the kitchen garbage out the back door is actually handier.

Is there a routine you need to shake, some flexibility you need to adopt, or a new spirit of spontaneity you’d love to embrace? What small change can you implement today that will create ripple effects into 2024 and beyond?

Micro habits are small yet meaningful practices that will improve your life when done consistently. These can be as uncomplicated as leaving your phone in another room when you retire to bed or visit the bathroom. As simple as rising a few minutes earlier or taking a minute to stretch or pray or meditate or step outside or drink a glass of water or count your blessings. I’m sure you can think of more. Can I challenge you to deactivate your most-used door (your least helpful habit) for a few weeks and see what better alternatives might arise?

It's Habit Forming!

New Year’s resolutions, I’m told, are merely a to-do list for the first week of January. 

I’ve got plans for 2019. For example, I am seriously considering turning sixty years old, just for kicks. In fact, I’ve already booked myself in at a writers’ retreat in Florida as a present to myself and an investment in the next decade. 

I’m also looking forward to retiring from my day job this spring, although I try to look at it not so much like retiring as changing jobs. I want to see what will happen if I devote that time and mental energy to my writing world instead of the municipal world I’ve been part of for the past ten years. This, of course, will require self-discipline by the bucketful, because no one but me will be setting my hours.

And frankly, that’s scary.

I’ve started reading Atomic Habits by James Clear and will probably be harping on it for a while. He says, “Changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results if you’re willing to stick with them for years.”

I know this is true. Ten years ago, I began writing 500 words a day. I’ve missed the mark many, many days. But 455 blog posts and three novels later, the habit has amounted to nearly half a million words—none of which would have happened had I not made it a small, daily habit. Or if I had declared myself a failure and quit the first time I skipped a day.

James Clear knows it’s easy to think those small, everyday habits don’t make a difference. He says, “When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it—but all that had gone before.”

He says to focus on your process, not on goals. Our efforts to develop desirable habits often go sideways because we buy into an all or nothing philosophy. A “go big or go home” way of thinking (which has never worked for me, because going home is my favorite thing.) The end goal is, in many ways, out of your hands. But the daily habit is totally within your grasp. My advice is two-fold.

1.     Go Small.

Start with one tiny, sustainable habit and don’t worry about the rest. Instead of trying to go completely sugar-free, can you learn to drink coffee or tea without sugar? Rather than organizing the whole house and failing, how about one drawer or shelf? If you ever learned to walk, you started with baby steps. And you fell a lot. Which leads to my second point…

2.     Start Again.

Don’t write the whole project off because you missed a day or even a week. Pick it up again tomorrow and don’t overthink it.

More on habits next week. Happy New Year!